Atelier Impopulaire, 2024
multimedia installation, b/w, sound, 30 min.
Poetry & Sound: Askia Touré, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, Calvin C. Hernton, Steve Cannon, Norman Pritchard, Tom Dent, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed
Performance: Blacks’ Myths + Dirar Kalash, Amirtha Kidambi, Laura Ortman, Alfredo Colon, Matt Nelson, Jason Nazary, Aleksandar Skoric & guests. Spoken words: No Land
Produced by Rewire Festival, Nest and Atelier Impopulaire
12 GATES is the second instance of BEFORE WE LOVE, an opera in three acts inspired by the UMBRA Poets Workshop (1961-63) that completes Atelier Impopulaire’s trilogy about the birth of underground artistic movements and civil rights activism in the Italian, African-American, and Latino communities that had migrated to New York City’s Lower East Side by the early 1960s.
12 GATES is a large-scale multimedia installation that integrates rare archival material with Atelier Impopulaire’s new footage, drawing on UMBRA’s literature to explore the fight against cultural oppression by the movements that advocated for social justice through multidisciplinary practices.
The formation of the UMBRA collective and its later disbanding, spanning the years 1961-63, are presented in a format that echoes the workshop and its prismatic nature.
It was in the workshop that the UMBRA poets laid the framework for the Black Arts Movement and changed the course of American Poetry, simultaneously prompting the Expanded Arts revolution and the birth of Free Jazz.
The installation follows the principle of non-chronological chronicle, faithful to the idea of Tom Dent - founder of the group - of generating a deconstruction of the “historical truth”of the narrator's singular point of view. The displays and the immersive multimedia thus become pluricultural fragments acting as agents of a meditation on history to which elements of contemporary visual languages function as a counterpoint, intertwined in a narrative that combines film works, poetry, abstract art and jazz.
A polyphonic experience embodied by the special performance of NYC duo Blacks' Myths, which will transform the installation into a multi-layered sound environment that evokes the plurality of voices and the complexity of the political dynamics that have shaped the UMBRA experience, the whose legacy is more timely and relevant than ever.
April 6-7 Nest & Rewire, Den Haag
Performances
Saturday April 6
1 pm + 4 pm
Sunday April 7
1pm + 3 pm
Nest in Laak