This three-day festival celebrates how music, sound, listening, and other arts can challenge our everyday relationships to place. We will be encouraged to rethink our understanding of Pittsburgh as Indigenous land, filled with sites of Indigenous presence—past, present, and future. Afro/Black and Indigenous Futurisms create possibilities to imagine “otherwise worlds,” in which Black and Indigenous solidarity thrive and paths are built against and beyond settler colonialism. All attendees are invited to consider their own positionalities and to commit to a more just and liberatory future.
The phrase “otherwise worlds” comes from Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, edited by Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, which “hopes to model practices of reading and listening that create new possibilities for thinking of, caring for, and talking to one another” (5). We hope that this festival creates some of those new possibilities, or at the very least, sets you on a path to create such possibilities.
This festival is part of the “Decolonized Futures” project funded by the Center the for Arts in Society. Pittsburgh CityPaper writer Amanda Waltz covers the festival here.
“Sun Goddess” by Morgan Overton
Festival Schedule:
Fri, April 9 – 7pm EST – streaming concert with Audiopharmacy
Sat, April 10 – 2:30pm EST – roundtable on Afro/Black and Indigenous Futurisms, featuring Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism, Johnnie Jae of A Tribe Called Geek, and DJ Shub
Sat, April 10 – 7pm EST – “Futures” YT concert, featuring music by Sadie Buck and the Six Nations Women Singers, Tanya Tagaq, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and Melody McKiver
Sun, April 11 – 2:30pm EST – Indigenous Pittsburgh Soundwalk
Use #resoundpgh on all social media platforms to share your participation in the festival weekend. All events will be streamed on the STUDIO YouTube channel.
Notes about “Sun Goddess”:
The painting references a solar eclipse, which was a point of inspiration for Nat Turner to organize the slave rebellion of 1831. The woman holds a bird, which is a reference to “Sankofa.” This word of the Akan people means to learn from the past and bring forward what is useful for the future.
Additional support has been provided by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
