Closing of Diasporic Life: w/ Phantom Wizard and Tumelo Mtimkhulu

On 24 July, as part of Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation, artist Tumelo Mtimkhulu will perform a live reading of a text composed for the manifestation. Phantom Wizard, composer of the soundtrack for ‘Overboard and still dreaming’ by Shertise Solano, will create an interactive performance centered on sound and togetherness. Bringing the themes of the film’s soundtrack to life through evoking sonic capacity of the ocean, the performance invites participants to gather, listen, and connect.

Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation unfolds as the second chapter of Diasporic Life. It builds on the earlier manifestation Diasporic Life: Black Togetherness as a Lingua Franca, developed with Barby Asante between London and Amsterdam. The project continues a multi-year international and interdisciplinary research process that considers the meaning, multiplicity and complexity of Black aliveness in Fortress Europe, in relation to the African continent and its many Diasporas. Diasporic Life centers the Black imaginative world and the ways it enchants everyday Black diasporic life beyond the shadow of anti-Black violence. How do “we” keep each other alive? In what ways does Diasporic Life manifest itself in visual and sonic cultures Black people make for themselves for each other? And what methodologies, dreams and processes (re)shape the practices and daily lives of Black artists, activists and cultural producers?

Join to close the second iteration of Diasporic Life, with the special offerings by Tumelo Mtimkhulu and Phantom Wizard. 

Bios:

umelo Mtimkhulu is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa, working between Johannesburg and Amsterdam. He employs visual and written text to grapple with questions of how to negotiate the personal and histories that one is heir to, primarily through a knowing of the body. Treating the often prescribed and singular idea of what history is as suspect. He conceives of these histories as ‘texts’ in themselves and the ‘human’ being as a site onto which these histories & experiences are written, effaced, rewritten and superimposed onto existing ‘texts’.

Phantom Wizard is a composer and improviser whose work blurs boundaries and reimagines traditions. Rather than controlling sound, he seeks to guide it, creating a space in which multiple truths can exist side by side. This principle lies at the heart of ‘Fribari’, a sonic philosophy. Phantom Wizard blends natural soundscapes, the timbral colours of Afro-diasporic music, experimental electronics, and the many ancient traditions that emerge from Suriname’s cultural melting pot. Phantom Wizard lives and works in Amsterdam Zuidoost.