26–27 October 2017
“Although it’s possible to contextualise Crampton’s work among that of her contemporaries, hers is a truly singular style…she’s able to synthesize numerous musical forms, crashing timbres, dense percussion, mauled samples, pretty synth lines, club music structures dismantled from within, and much more, into bold music rich with purpose and feeling.” – THE WIRE
Elysia Crampton’s eclectic and unrestrained electronic music is the flashpoint of a myriad influences opening upon the complexity and multifacetedness of Aymara becoming. Underscored by radical and queer politics, Crampton’s experimental work gives sonorous form to contemporary expressions of Aymara resistance and survival: a project of “becoming-with,” in the shades given this term by Donna Haraway via prison abolitionist Che Gossett.
This residency marks the first fruits of a new collaboration between Elysia and multi-disciplinary Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca
Crampton's album Demon City, composed in honour of the revolutionary Bartolina Sisa and her yungueña grandmother, was deemed a “masterwork” by Rolling Stone and was one of Pitchfork’s 20 best experimental albums of 2016. Her latest release, Spots y Escupitajo, leads the listener into “a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures.
“With her oblique and politically-charged productions, this Virginia-based artist is striking a new prescence in electronic music.” – RESIDENT ADVISOR
Donna Huanca’s installations are activated by live performers and fuse tactile materials, such as clothing and cultural ephemera. Her focus is on the body- in particular the skin, which is simultaneously the surface on which our personhood is inscribed and the surface through which we experience the world around us. Huanca examines conventions of behavior in our interaction with bodies in space and the invisible histories that are accumulated through those gestures. By exposing the body and concealing it under layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca’s performers embody our instinctive reactions to flesh, which becomes both a familiar and an abstract, inaccessible subject. References to origins, memory, time, and identity run throughout Huanca’s work, which evokes the complexity of influences that shape who we are.
