On Thursday, December 1st at 7PM,  Composer and theatre-maker meLê yamomo presented a video-performance-lecture titled “…and when I speak, my brown skin and the entire ecology vibrate.” At the lecture Yamomo resounded their philosophy of sound and the sonus—migrating between continents, cultures, artistic practices, and academic disciplines. meLê was in conversation with academic Teilhard Paradela following a live music performance with video projection.

What lies in between theory and aesthetics? Situatedness and migration? Sounding and listening? Performing and perception? the Universal Self and the Colonial Other? What understandings transpire in imagining beyond social imaginations of racial, national, cultural, gender, or disciplinary borders and boundaries? What knowledges emerge through hearing? How can processes of soundings and listening transform us towards a postmigrant society?

Watch Yamomo’s full presentation at this link: https://vimeo.com/783399935

While in Guelph meLê also offered a free workshop on Friday, December 2nd titled “Post:Migrant Presences.” How can ‘presence’ interrupt dominant aesthetics? How could the inhabiting of the here and now be a revolutionary act? If history is a musical score of modernity or a play script of colonial conquest, how can improvisation be a radical act of decoloniality? This workshop explores how ‘presence’ constitutes aesthetic experience, and how the aesthetic reshifts how we compose or order the world. In understanding our movements, mobilities, and presences within social, geographical, and historical spaces, how might our improvisation radically shift history? Parousia, according to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer is the state of absolute presence—the timelessness of an experience despite and within its multiple repetitions in art and performance. In suspending time through parousia, how can we decolonize fixed scores and deterministic dramaturgies to improvise and migrate our present to new futures?

The Big Ideas in Art + Culture + Improvisation lecture series is presented by CAFKA, Musagetes, and IICSI.