The Lake Before the Sun Was Born
2-4 November 2021
Programmed by Ignota Books and Auto Italia in cooperation with NTS Radio
The Lake Before the Sun Was Born is a series of conversations on the occasion of Chuquimamani-Condori (Elysia Crampton Chuquimia) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton's exhibition Amaru's Tongue: Daughter, currently on display at Auto Italia in London. Engaging with themes emerging from Amaru's Tongue: Daughter and its broader context, artists, curators, scholars, archivists, and herbalists will explore land ties, herbalism, Indigenous spacetime, oral history and the archive, abolition and activism.
2 November: Abolition and Solidarity
Departing from Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter and its underpinning by the Aymara nation’s abolitionist traditions and their inseparability from Black radical traditions, curator and educator Thiago De Paula Souza will be in conversation with anarcho-feminist collective Mujeres Creando and writer, DJ and cultural producer Sonia M. Garcia. This will expand on solidarity among Indigenous and Black people and other groups who experience oppression under colonial legacies across the world and abolition in relation to their respective practices as curators, researchers and activists.
3 November: Herbalism and Land Ties
Writer and artist Edna Bonhomme chairs a conversation bringing together medical herbalists Sage LaPena and Rasheeqa Ahmad with a guided ancestral meditation by multidisciplinary artist Tabita Rezaire. The talk will focus on land ties, herbalism, and relations to land through ritual and lineage in the context of Indigeneity, as well as diasporic experiences shaped by broader dynamics of displacement and extraction, and ancestry, memory and repair.
4 November: Archive and Spacetime
Chaired by artist and researcher Onyeka Igwe, David Aruquipa Pérez and Grace Dillon will discuss oral history traditions and the roles of the archive and spacetimes in knowledge preservation and advocating for minorities. They will speak on their practices as authors, archivists and activists and expand on research on pre- and post-colonial queerness in Bolivia and beyond and placemaking for and recording of ethnic minorities in the Western and diasporic context. They will expand on strands of speculative fiction emerging from Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter, and touch on world endings both as possible futures and already past events and the importance of science fiction to Indigenous understandings of spacetime and the possibilities of imagining otherwise.
All conversations will take place at 7pm UTC / 3pm BOT / 12pm PDT via Zoom.
The events are all 'pay what you want'. All profits are donated to Land In Our Names, a grassroots Black-led collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice.