Following a latest main present on the Brooklyn Museum, artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons took to the streets of Manhattan on the mornings of September 7 and September 20 with a procession that gathered artists, musicians, poets and the general public to stroll collectively, making stops at websites important to Black, Cuban and Cuban-American communities throughout town. Every cease activated artistic moments, together with poetry readings, culminating in an art-making workshop and music performances. On this manner, the Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity turned an essential train in neighborhood constructing, social consciousness and communal sharing.
This highly effective collective efficiency demonstrates that María Magdalena Campos-Pons is not only an artist but in addition an advocate and healer. She creates empires of magnificence and care from easy parts, fostering neighborhood experiences that remodel into collective rituals of reconnection, regeneration and rebirth. Embracing an enormous vary of supplies, Campos-Pons’s works manifest completely different energies, typically ranging from mundane each day realities to disclose connections to the otherworldly. Honoring the feminine lineage of rituals of care, her works are workout routines of respiratory and birthing, channeling vitality. Tapping into Afro-Cuban Santería, her performances and installations embrace the multiplicity of self and its connections to deeper ancestral roots that unite us all. By tracing the steps of the previous, every procession envisions a extra inclusive future and celebrates the ability of neighborhood to assemble by creativity as a collective pressure for regeneration.
Organized by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy in partnership with Harlem Artwork Park, the primary iteration of the procession started in Harlem and concluded at El Museo del Barrio, passing by the “Dos Alas (Two Wings) Mural.” The second procession began from the Monument to the Cuban author José Julián Martí in Central Park, stopping on the web site of a silent parade the place 10,000 Black Individuals gathered on July 28, 1917 to protest racial violence, lynching and discrimination, in addition to the previous web site of the Coloured Orphan Asylum, the primary orphanage for Black youngsters in the USA. The procession concluded in Madison Sq. Park with a poetry studying by Willie Perdomo, a Carnegie Corridor Citywide live performance by acclaimed Afro-Cuban jazz singer Daymé Arocena and a efficiency by musician Kamaal Malak.
Observer caught up with Campos-Pons through the second iteration of the procession to debate the importance of this collective ritual.
The ritualistic facet is on the heart of this efficiency and of your total observe, which makes use of collective therapeutic processes and reconnection with ancestral lineage to elaborate collective trauma. How do you consider a procession can assist join folks and transcend particular person wants and emotions to create this communal second of unity, therapeutic and reflection?
Once I was very younger, I witnessed processions in my hometown of La Vega, a small former sugar plantation within the coronary heart of the Matanzas Province Southern Countryside. These celebrations of the Orishas Days, led by Gloria Javielito and Nengo had been festive and really severe events stuffed with rituals of respect and care. These occasions left an indelible impression on me. The city and its inhabitants at all times got here collectively as one, plus the numerous guests in attendance. They had been occasions of therapeutic and studying. Traditions had been handed, and reverie for elders was current. Look after the youth was current. The reality was current. Resiliency and magnificence of civic conduct had been current. I feel as an artist I acquired some profound information then that informs my current observe. Impressed by these sources, this procession emerges as a wanted gesture at this second and as a mirrored image of and response to the current time. There are dramatic shifts in place, scale, and circumstances, however we, the folks, stay basically the identical. I’m within the complexities of this paradox.
As we discovered out of your latest present on the Brooklyn Museum, your performances are accompanied by and conceived first as drawings and delicate gouaches. I used to be very within the intuitive facet of these works and the way they appear to faucet into one thing extra profound within the collective unconscious, rising from a second of non secular reconnection with different areas and occasions. Are you able to inform us extra in regards to the means of conceiving your performances—the genesis of your efficiency works and this one particularly, in addition to their relation to the drawings?
My observe is all one interconnected line of concepts and visions. I dream of some items. I write others. I draw and paint others. I construct objects within the course of as therapeutic packets to provide to efficiency members. When Brooke [Kamin Rapaport] invited me, my first response was, “Wow. Why me?” There are such a lot of superb colleagues I love in New York; I used to be shocked and elated at similar time. Then I went straight to work.
To rejoice the 20th anniversary of Madison Sq. Park Conservancy’s Public Artwork Program, I mapped and traced town, incorporating historical past and private narratives in methods which can be important to myself and others, just like the symbolism of New York Metropolis as a nest the place all of the birds of the planet Earth discover a department to relaxation, a pool of water from which to drink, restore vitality and fly the best and longest distance. That was true for Jose Marti, Ana Mendieta, Celia Cruz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Reynaldo Arenas and Juan Delgado Calzadilla. What a rare place.
I did a number of gouaches of the procession. I imagined phrases releasing within the air, and for that, I wanted poets. I wanted phrases and songs of affirmation and alluring sounds. I needed to design a pair of sneakers and fill the house with a selected scent. I noticed the procession shifting in with the rhythm of town however marking a unique tempo. Drawing a line of poetry and shutting with these superb musicians, Kamaal Malak and Dayme Arocena is the complete circle.
Your discuss on the Brooklyn Museum on the event of your present made clear that you simply’re a healer along with your creative observe and that your thought of artwork can’t be disconnected from its influence on folks as an agent of potential constructive change. In the long run, what’s the position of artwork for you? With this particular efficiency, what are you aiming to attain and generate for these collaborating or spectating?
I’m focused on folks I meet as a stranger day by day in no matter a part of the world I discover myself. I’ve curiosity and love for fellow people, as we’re a number of the most extraordinary manifestations of creativity. Every one among us is a miracle and a totally incredible revelation of the mastery of the universe. That’s awe-inspiring materials. We’re pure abstraction, thriller and magic. We should care and join with one another by this different enigma that’s love.