Vocal Opacities is a band, a practice, a research container and a collaborative project about collaboration, engaging Black experimental poetics and performance practices centered in music.
Former librarian S*an D. Henry-Smith invites you to an afternoon of live performance @ the library.
What happens when the tools of our study talk back, our fleeting results lead us again to the start? Absorbing us whole, the microscope becomes the microphone, amplifying into multilateral scale.
In this event Metro54 invites poet and artist S*an D. Henry-Smith to host Breathing Room. For this first program, Henry-Smith, alongside fellow poet/artist Dove/Christopher Kirubi, will offer poetry readings at Bar Bario. Together, Kirubi and Henry-Smith will share a conversation on breath, sound, and movement as it relates to their practices.
An exploration of overlapping rhythms across bodies of work and the incidental worlds they unearth. A performance by S*an D. Henry Smith and Alec Mateo. Production and Composition Assistance by Monique Todd.
S*an D. Henry-Smith
2022
What happens when the tools of our study talk back, our fleeting results lead us again to the start? Absorbing us whole, the microscope becomes the microphone, amplifying into multilateral scale.
- Nov 17 @ 19:00-22:00
- Tempel, Tolstraat 160, Amsterdam
For their second program hosted with Metro54, S*an D. Henry-Smith invites the members of the yet-to-be named band they’re in alongside Ladipo Famdou, Alec Mateo, and Monique Todd, to perform the second iteration of to be held while taking shape. Activating the science fiction writing of Famdou, vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Henry-Smith and Mateo will present a live score to the text, as Famdou live-sculpts wire figures, engaging an improvised dialogue of shadow-dance and sound, featuring production support from Todd.
—
Ladipo Famodu is an artist and former afrofuturist who works with wire sculpture and collage. Disillusioned with speculation, he now finds comfort in playful irony and surrealism. His previous education in chemistry informs his understanding (and criticism) of the scientific gaze. In 2021, he initiated the program Recipes for a Technological Undoing.
S*an D. Henry-Smith is a collaborative practitioner working primarily in poetry, photography, sound, and by extension, performance and publishing. They are the author of Wild Peach, and the director of Lunar New Year.
Alec Mateo is a Dominican Writer and performer from New York, working with poetry, sound, and movement to explore fugitive subjectivities and modes of togetherness.
Monique Todd is a London-born writer working through essays, mapping, sound and sculpture.
