Portfolio

An intertwined performance-installation

Installation of entities, unspoken and extended co-ontologies that act at the same time, in the same space. A body (in) transit, that evokes archives, leaves traces, plays with the unknown and navigates between temporalities. A platform for encounter, exchange and co-creation between artists and their diasporic experiences. A point of convergence for interdisciplinary perspectives, exploring “call and response” approaches linked to social themes such as ancestry, identity and decolonial artistic practices.

Inspired by Bakongo Cosmogram (dikenga dia Kôngo) and in the vital force Kalunga, the central concept of the work is to explore the meanings of Kalunga in performance practices, reflecting on transatlantic black history and the Afro-diaspora resulting from this crossing of the sea.

THE Bakongo Cosmogram is a circle divided by a four-point cross, which follows the path of the sun. This celestial scope is translated, for the Bantu-Kongo and their diasporic descendants, as an infinite, circular and spiral trajectory of life — human-ancestral. Kalunga It is the horizontal liquid membrane of the cross: the sea. It is the border between the world of the living and the world where ancestral souls live. Kalunga presides over the body-spirit-body metamorphosis. It is a symbolic space of transition, where the body communicates with the archive of the waters and with the archive of the earth.

There is a transformative aspect to the Kalunga space — the activation of life, of force, of manifestation, of mutual communication, of call and response between co-ontologies that operate above and below Kalunga.

The visible and the invisible.
The tangible and the intangible.
Time and its temporalities.

Performance // Concept: Luanda Ram Jacoel
Collaborations:

• Music: Ben LaMar Gay

• Video: Bianca Turner

• Embroidery: Daniela Aquino
  (Inspired by cosmograms, visual artist/performer Daniela Aquino started out as a ekedji in Candomblé — a highly valued female position, caregiver of the Orixás — and brings to her research the mythologies of the Orixás through embroidered installations.)

• Set design: Alice Tomola

Tutors: Saul Garcia López and Tiganá Santana
Special thanks: Sueli Carneiro, Maurice Jacoel, Koffi Kôkô, Jamie J. Philbert, Karmenlara Ely, Eleonora Fabião, Fernanda Branco, Cecilio Orozco, Alhagie Jacobsen, Ellen Palmeira, Ayesha Jordan, Juliana Porto, Azul Filho de Luiz, Hanna Filomen Mjåvatn, Casa Sueli Carneiro, classmates, friends and family.