Sovereign Futures, Chant Down Performance

Sovereign Futures, a four-day convening of leading artists, academics, curators, and minds that will unfold over time and in multiple locations. Organized by Visiting Curator Allison Glenn, Sovereign Futures presents a constellation of artists’ projects, performances, meals, and panel discussions that provoke dialogues on sovereignty through the lens of contemporary practices. Camila Falquez and Luis Rincón Alba where invited to be the closing event of the conveining with an iteration of their performance Chant Down. (April 2024)

Chant Down is a performance by Luis Rincón Alba and Camila Falquez, with Carolina Oliveros, Natalia Perez, Gina Soto, and Mobéy Lola Irizarry that investigates the forces and rebellious energies that inhabit traditional Caribbean songs and explores the anticolonial legacies that gave shape to ancestral percussive and chanting techniques. This performative exploration revisits the modes these legacies are reactivated through repetitive rhythmic and harmonic structures. Awakened by collective chanting, the performance seeks to access the vibrational registers—sometimes secret and hidden—in which the history of Black and Indigenous struggle found refuge.