presents
September 28th, 2024
Arts Court,
67 Nicholas St.
Ottawa
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Chukwubuikem + Kosisochukwu Nnebe (for The Seeds We Carry)
Chukwubuikem Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian lawyer based out of New York City. With past creative experiences that include hosting a music radio show, editing a campus magazine, and organizing EDI-focused community events, Nnebe’s wide-ranging background speaks to the cross-pollination of ideas across fields and interests. The common thread throughout Nnebe’s creative endeavours has been the championing of human connection and the uplifting of under-represented voices. Increasingly, Nnebe is exploring circularity in the fashion industry as an opportunity for sustainable change-making and community-building. Curating the musical programming for The Seeds We Carry has been Nnebe’s first curatorial project. Nnebe currently serves as the Co-President of the McGill Black Alumni Association.
Where: SAW Courtyard
When: June 8th, 6:55 pm
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, curator and writer. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics that range from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. At its core, Nnebe’s practice is interested in anti-colonial and -imperial world-building through acts of solidarity (human and otherwise), the troubling of colonial logics, and speculative (re)imaginings of otherwise pasts, presents and futures. Nnebe’s work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada, and she has forthcoming exhibitions at the Bowling Green State University Gallery in Ohio, Art Museum of Toronto, and Green Space Gallery in Miami, Florida.
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Curatorial statement for the musical programming for The Seeds We Carry
by Chukwubuikem Nnebe
The musical programming for The Seeds We Carry is a cross-continental and pan-diasporan exploration of Black music and movement-making as manifestations of Black resistance, Black survival, and ultimately Black aliveness. Showcasing forms of Black creativity birthed in the Caribbean and North America and whose roots can be traced to the African continent, this musical programming seeks to celebrate the temporal and spatial linkages that exist between Afro-descendant communities and that have traced the evolution and expansion of the Black diaspora around the world over the past four centuries.
Through participatory workshops, festivalgoers will be invited to learn the history – and the moves – of voguing and stepping, two dance forms that alchemized experiences of marginalization and cultural denial into expressions of Black artistry, resourcefulness, and community-building. While voguing and ballroom culture emerged as embodiments of queer Black and Brown resistance and solidarity in the face of homophobic and transphobic exclusion, stepping was borne out of the prohibition of traditional cultural practices inherited by the enslaved in the American South from their ancestors stolen away from the continent. In both instances, the resulting styles of movement-making speak to Black creativity and its potential for sprouting – against all odds – entire worlds of art from the seeds we carry.
The musical programming will also feature live performances that seek to celebrate and contextualize Black musical traditions through a contemporary lens. One such creative practice that will be on display is the Jamaican sound-system culture, which speaks to the indomitable nature of Black aliveness and its inability to be contained to a single location. Rather, through the construction of mobile sound systems, the spirit of Black joy moves wherever the riddims take it, from the streets of Kingston to the steps of Arts Court. Indeed, these tropical sounds can be as fluid with regard to space as to style, with avant-garde creators pushing the envelope with dub-inspired, club-focused electronic soundscapes that deftly merge danceability with experimentation. Similarly, other artists are expanding the bounds of club music through creative practices that layer a multiplicity of sonic influences all rooted in the global African diaspora. Starting with a base of traditional drum-laden beats atop which is sprinkled Jersey club, Brazilian baile funk, Ivoirian coupé-décalé, and South African amapiano, such textural assemblages of rhythms upon riddims reflect a kaleidoscopic conception of Black creativity that transcends both time and space.
As a whole, the musical programming for The Seeds We Carry aims to foreground Black artistry as an inheritance from our ancestors, a gift through which we communicate our resistance, our survival, and our zest for life with each sound we make and every step we take.