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Conversations Without Walls: Samita Sinha & Cecilia Vicuña

October 21, 2020

Closed captions are available by clinking the “CC” button on the video.

A PDF transcript of the conversation is linked here.

This Conversation was recorded on October 2, 2020 and first broadcasted on YouTube Live on Saturday, October 10, 2020.

This Conversation Without Walls (CWW) features artist and composer, Samita Sinha, and poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist, Cecilia Vicuña. These longtime friends engage in an improvised and energetic exchange pulling from centuries-old traditions and their decades-long practices of improvisation, sound, song, ritual, and poetics. At times playful, at times wracked with grief, Sinha and Vicuña communicate through their own artistic mediums with utterances, gestures, language, and sonic vibrations at a time when words have often failed us.

Included in this CWW

People

Alice Coltrane, (also known as Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda) American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, singer, composer, and swamini. (1937 – 2007)
John Coltrane, American jazz saxophonist and composer (1926 – 1967)
Eric Dolphy, American jazz alto saxophonist, bass, clarinetist, and flautist (1928-1964)
Lucy Lippard, American writer, art critic, activist, and curator
Claudio Mercado, Chilean anthropologist, writer and filmmaker
Okwui Okpokwasili, Brooklyn-based writer, performer, and choreographer
María RostworowskiTovar de Diez Canseco, Historian of Peruvian Ancient Cultures and the Inca Empire (1915-2016)

Texts and Forms

Lippard, Lucy. “Spinning the Common Thread,” in de Zegher, M. Catherine (ed.) The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1997. 7-15
Hindustani North Indian Classical Music
- Bandish – A melodic composition in Hindustani classical music, in Hindi bandish means, “Binding together”
Rigveda – An ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns

Places

Aconcagua, Argentina (Mountain in Argentina)
Concón, Chile (Coastal city in Chile)

Cón and Kaun(a)

(As defined by the artists)

Cón – (language unknown but older than Quechua) A creator deity, associated to the Paracas (800 BCE – 100 BCE) and Nasca culture (100 BCE – 800 CE). Stands for water and chaos, regarded as female by contemporary indigenous fishermen in Concón, Chile
Kaun(a) – (Hindi) Fragment of a Hindustani bandish

Events

Cecilia Vicuña, Thread Mansion, one woman exhibition at The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002
Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, August 4, 2020
Okwui Okpokwasili & Samita Sinha, A Shared Evening (Cancelled due to Pandemic), March 2020
“Miracle Babies,” Earthquake in Mexico, 1985

Samita Sinha is an artist and composer who synthesizes Hindustani classical and Bengali Baul folk vocal traditions and embodied energetic practices “to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation.” Sinha’s works have been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center, Danspace Project, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Onassis Foundation, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust, and others.

http://samitasinha.com/

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. The author of 25 art and poetry books, her works are included in museum collections such as the Tate London, MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporaìneo de Chile, Museo de Arte de Lima, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chile.

http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/

Tags: Cecilia Vicuña, Conversations Without Walls, Samita Sinha