Vunja! Sonic Collage, Musicscapes, AfroRhizomatic Dance (2022)

The Vunja! Sonic Collage and Musicscapes projects were initially conceptualized as two separate, yet overlapping projects within the larger framing of the Vunja Village of Technologies. Echoes from the 2021 We Will Dance with Mountains course-festival and other conversations, thoughts and murmurings suggested a bubbling energy for the project’s further development at that time. There was a feeling in early 2022 that the time and space were right to support the further coalescence of the weird, morphy sci-art project on crack(s) known as Vunja! The curators and contributors thought of this as a place where cracklines could be extended out of We Will Dance with Mountains (projects, products, ideas, relationships, events, etc.) with the idea that they might well become the very technologies needed for sharing and growing together. The Village of Technologies was conceived as a communal platform for experimenting with alternative (more useful) technologies (practices, techniques, skills, methods); a co-research space to invite and feed novelty. It was envisioned to be a beautiful and nourishing space for collaborators. From these original experiments, the AfroRhizomatic Dance and Vunja! Dancefloor DJs collective were born and continue to thrive as a translocal exploration of Vunja Soundscapes.

The Sonic Collage project arose out of a collaboration between Eileen Vogn, Austen Smith, tUkU Mathews, Cliff Berrien, Sibisule Xaba and Geci Karuri-Sebina during the 2021 iteration of Báyò Akómoláfé’s festival-course, We Will Dance with Mountains. A spontaneous, musical / spoken-word / auditory landscape was co-created across three countries and multiple time zones and presented during the final live session of We Will Dance with Mountains on December 18, 2021. Here is that exquisite piece. From there, building on the poetic dialogue approach this crew had been experimenting with, the idea was to develop the methodology further and build up to a selection of works to publish and distribute publicly. There were also aspirations to offer workshops to support people to develop and blend their creative works using the Sonic Collage method / process.The project eventually fractaled out into a number of other experiments.

Musicscapes: music tools & activities for assisting personal progress & holistic music-making was a project launched and led by Eileen Rene Vogn. It included workshops experimenting with simple everyday actions, resources, ideas and situations to embed musical learning / creating / expressing into whatever might be relevant for the moment(s). Eileen collaborated throughout 2022 with Cliff Berrien, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Sibisule Xaba and a number of other independent artists and creatives to produce several pieces: Hadithi, Urban Swan, These Slave Ships, and Fugitive. You can see a collection of these auditory co-creations, stewarded and organized by Eileen here. View a video collage that gives a sense of these musical experiments.

While this collaboration with ten came to an end in early 2023, Eileen continues to offer Musicscaping activities for creating original pieces, exchanges, collaborations and presentations using musical instruments, voices, organically created sounds and play to encourage co-creation for greeting, divination, gratitude, hospitality, performance, inquiry and exploration in decolonization and non-duality. Learn more on Eileen’s website here.

As part of the Sonic Collage exploration, Cliff and others sought to take the AfroRhizomatic Dance Party experiment to the next level with the Omnicentric Ontofugitive Dance Hall. The AfroRhizomatic Dance was, in part, an Afrocene-inspired engagement sparked by something Cliff heard Robin DiAngelo say to Resmaa Menakem once: “Most people are raised in a monoculture and go from cradle to grave, not knowing much of anything about the lifeways of other traditions and cultures, and we receive NO MESSAGES that tell us we are missing anything of value.” Cliff offered these online dance parties in 2022 as opportunities to move, discover and celebrate with music from throughout the African diaspora. The Omnicentric Ontofugitive Dance Hall concept was based on the idea of exploring multiple, simultaneous ‘centers’ via a series of online dance parties from different cultural and identitarian traditions, including dances from India, the Arab World, Brazil… queer dances and crip dances. The initiative arose in response to a question once posed about ontofugitivity and postactivism by Báyò Akómoláfé: What is Vunja then but an Afro-Caribbean-inspired convening of planetary postactivist research into the omnicentric fugitivity of a world when things have fallen apart? And although the dances didn’t roll out as originally intended, most of the original dancefloor DJs came together for a Vunja! Party in March 2023 and continued to co-create amazing multi-centered playlists and host these virtual dancehalls throughout the sixth iteration of We Will Dance with Mountains. Here are just a few samples of these dynamic playlists: