"opera infinita is a multi-dimensional project conceived by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jota Mombaça. It departs from the practices of collective sensing, polyvocality, and ‘elemental listening’ activated through a series of multi-local offline and online vocal gatherings. The project’s first activation ‘chapter 0’, presented in the frame of Mombaça’s writer-in-residence at Nottingham Contemporary, is an original sonic statement composed in collaboration with Brazilian sonic producer and researcher Anti Ribeiro. Listen here.

The upcoming chapter of the opera infinita emerges from a questioning of the intricate relation between the damned legacies of colonial extraction and the futurities and temporalities it projects. Dwelling on the elemental interconnectedness of blood, iron ore, the planet Mars, and infrared light, we intend to activate a collective form of study that is not limited to the field of critique; rather, a study that precipitates a form of presence that expands sensibility towards a sonic, immersive experience with and within the Red Earth and its components.

In the workshop at Beursschouwburg, we intend to initiate such a process by gathering a group of indisciplinary artists, thinkers, sonic producers, activists, visionary fiction enthusiasts and creators from Brussels, whose practices engage with elemental thinking, radical imagination, anti-colonial ecologies, black and indigenous communalities, and collective forms of sensing and interacting with social and earthly materialities."  — Jota Mombaça and Denise Ferreira da Silva

WHO?

Jota Mombaça is an indisciplinary artist whose work derives from poetry, critical theory and performance. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Through performance, visionary fiction and situational strategies of knowledge production, they intend to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and co-editor of Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty). Her art-related work includes texts for publications linked to the 2016 Liverpool and and Sao Paulo Biennales, Venice 2017, and Documenta 14, as well as collaborations, such as the play Return of the Vanishing Peasant, with Ros Martin, the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), with Arjuna Neuman; and events (performances, talks, and private sessions) and texts related Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri.

CHECK THE OPEN CALL