Breathing in Babylon – Metro54: Weekender 1 – 4 dec
“Come with all your loss, your regrets, sins, memories, black outs, secrets. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.” ― Warsan Shire
Thursday 1 December (evening: 7pm-10pm)
Hanging out is Political:
A prelude to the weekend with small surprises, music, drinks and artworks
DJ set by Ike Melchizedek
Friday 2 December (evening: 7.30pm-9pm)
Breathing Room: Hold Your Breath
An evening on rest, transformative justice and privilege
Saturday 3 December
Afternoon program: 2pm – 5pm
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Workshop I Tina Reden
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Soungou DJ set
Evening program: 7pm-9pm
Breathing to Transgress:
An evening on music and memories, breath and preserving the collective as well as the selves with performances and conversation with Pelumi Adejumo, Farida Sedoc & Rhoda Tchokokam.
Sunday 4 December
Exhibiting Artists
- Marcel van den Berg
- Tarek Lakhrissi
- Christian Nyampeta
- Cedric Kouame
Breathing in Babylon is a proposition to address the vibrancy of sonic and visual cultures and the racial, political and ecological turmoil that shape our societies, streets and wellbeing of our communities. To breathe within these supremacist structures, from a racialized position is to intervene into its apparatus of violence and repression. It is to ring di alarm, be alive and remembered. With this program we bring together sounds, art, performances, music and conversations that attune to our laughter, losses, love, regrets, memories, chaos, black outs and desire to catch our breath in these times of duress.
This four-day long program zooms into how alternative situations and praxis breathe life into street culture pasts, presents and futures. By acknowledging the spatial and everyday colonial and capitalist wounds and secrets that make it difficult to catch our Breath in Babylon, we carve out space for being together. This program centralizes the way people use intimate stories and fabulation, humor, dance, silence and songs, which emerge from (art), cultural and sonic practices to address the politics of breathing and imagination in cities that don’t care for marginalized people’s imagination, dreams and wellbeing. Whose oxygen is compromised? After all, we don’t all breathe the same air nor does breathing together rarely mean breathing the same.
Together with artists, poets, designers, thinkers and hustlers, Metro54 and Kanaal 40 look into these questions and ways the futures of street culture unfolds through wayward forms and practices. Breathing in Babylon is a critical celebration, a funeral, a cypher of beings and through experiments, performances, conversations, workshops and dancing, a space for coming together, emergent and everyday strategies of breathing.
The program is free for all to enter except for the club nights. See (club) calendar tab for exact program.
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