INVOCATION
INVOCATION
Embedded Files
Invocation was an immersive sound installation and performance exhibited as part of the Embark/Embody group midway exhibition at University of Nevada, Reno in Lake Tahoe. The work explored mythmaking, Afrofuturism, and ancestry through ritual, storytelling, and movement. The installation brought together recorded family stories, field recordings from the Atlantic ocean, drums, water, braided hair, and a masked, costumed entity, known as the Tempest, to create a space where ancestral memory could serve as a spark for imagining better futures.
Invocation was an immersive sound installation and performance exhibited as part of the Embark/Embody group midway exhibition at University of Nevada, Reno in Lake Tahoe. The work explored mythmaking, Afrofuturism, and ancestry through ritual, storytelling, and movement. The installation brought together recorded family stories, field recordings from the Atlantic ocean, drums, water, braided hair, and a masked, costumed entity, known as the Tempest, to create a space where ancestral memory could serve as a spark for imagining better futures.
The work considers ritual as a way of receiving encoded messages, embodied knowledge, and inherited ways of being/surviving/imagining that have been carried across generations, altered through displacement, and kept alive through practice. Through sound, movement, and embodied transformation and storytelling, Invocation created a space for encountering ancestral presence and imagining what futures might emerge from, or be created by, that encounter.
The work considers ritual as a way of receiving encoded messages, embodied knowledge, and inherited ways of being/surviving/imagining that have been carried across generations, altered through displacement, and kept alive through practice. Through sound, movement, and embodied transformation and storytelling, Invocation created a space for encountering ancestral presence and imagining what futures might emerge from, or be created by, that encounter.
Total performance and audio run time: 56 minutes and 49 seconds
Total performance and audio run time: 56 minutes and 49 seconds
Exhibition Audio
Exhibition Audio
Please use headphones for all
INVOCATION (full score)
*features Atlantic Ocean field recordings, original compositions, spoken word, personal interviews, breath, audio from odium, and additional foley/collected sounds
INVOCATION - full audio.mp3THE FLYING GIFT (excerpt)
*features Atlantic Ocean field recordings, original composition
The Flying GiftWATER AT EYE LEVEL (excerpt)
*features Atlantic Ocean field recordings, original composition
Water at Eye LevelDEATH RATTLE (excerpt)
*features Atlantic Ocean field recordings, original foley, original composition, audio from odium
death rattle.mp3All documentation below was crowdsourced from attendees and peers. Thank you for your contributions!
All documentation below was crowdsourced from attendees and peers. Thank you for your contributions!
Additional Notes:
Field recordings were made at the Atlantic Ocean as the basis for sound design. The audio installation also included original compositions, recorded spoken word, recorded family interviews, and warped audio. The exhibition space also feature braided synthetic and human hair dripping at polyrhythmic intervals onto small hand drums and a pot filled with water and hair from the living.
The costume was created out of pounds of layered organza and chiffon strips, allowed to fray naturally over time. The mask is hand sculpted paper, wire, polymer clay, and elastic, painted and adorned with wooden beads, cowrie shells, and organza and chiffon strips.
The main performance area was enclosed in a tent, consisting of multiple saplings and shrubs, hand-laid pine needles and pinecones, shaped ahead of the performance and reshaped during the performance through movement. The central point of the performance area featured a small altar at the base of a shrub: a plaster cast of a face, set into the earth and partially obscured in dirt, surrounded by rings of herbs, shells, sticks, feathers (serendipitously found at the site on performance day), and pinecones. The shrub was also hung with hair and talismans of the deceased.
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