Jean Carla Rodea: All Your Sojourns Have Led To This (Omen)

Saturday, November 11th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present All Your Sojourns Have Led to This (Omen), the culminating commission from 2023 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Jean Carla Rodea. The interdisciplinary artist builds the project to its conclusion following earlier residency presentations at CPR – Center for Performance Research and Smack Mellon. The final work will premiere at The Mark O’Donnell Theater at the Entertainment Community Fund Arts Center in Downtown Brooklyn.

The second half of All Your Sojourns Have Led to This (Omen) is presented in collaboration with Asiya Wadud, Art Jones, Ana Rivera, Vered Engelhard, and TISSUB.

Notes from Jean Carla Rodea on All Your Sojourns Have Led to This (Omen):

As my residency comes to a close, I would like to acknowledge the previous iterations of this work where stillness, opacity, and apparitions, were evoked through embodiment, poetics, and image. All Your Sojourns Have Led to This (Omen), is a composition for voice, guitar, electronics, and video projection, that vies for various potential outcomes. An omen, which is a sign or signal, can open pathways that may be seen as a dynamic representation with a vast array of possibilities void of value.

I am interested in what happens vocally, sonically, and visually when one is present yet unseen. I often consider these concepts as I explore filming and recording natural elements that manifest as sound, video, and performance later in the process. During my year-long residency, All Your Sojourns Have Led to This takes different forms and incorporates diverse media (works for voice and electronics, sound installation, and video/projection mapping) while exploring invisibility as a portal for strategies of resistance.

My work is informed by shifting and adaptable identities, immigration, ritual, performance, ecology, construction work, improvisation, and interaction with and through time-based media in diverse spaces. I’m interested in creating art that questions critical sociopolitical issues such as the politics of the body, gender, and the asymmetry of human relations. I’m invested in understanding how time is insistently constructed through memory and how these memories, whether embodied or recorded in spaces, are documented and re/constructed through the body’s physical and vocal potential.

Whether it takes place in my (personal) archive or an institution, archival research often leads me to draw from fiction and speculative history around documents, physical traces, and spaces. A particular area of interest is how these robust processes can interrupt and make space for fictional dimensions that can disrupt and subvert the norm. By interacting with the archive, performative roles are present. Often I am a witness, a mere observer, an ethnographer, or a researcher registering and transmitting as much as possible from an event in a temporary space.

Jean Carla Rodea (b. in Mexico City) is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her/their work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Her/their artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installations and performances. As a musician and improviser, Jean Carla is dedicated to performing and composing various music/sound in diverse settings–from solo to large ensembles. She/they have performed and recorded with William Parker, Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir, and Cecilia Lopez’s Machinic Fantasies. In addition, she/they lead her/their multi-media projects; Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina, and Nine Easy Steps Toward Oblivion. Jean Carla has worked with Asiya Wadud, Jo Wood-Brown, Patricia Nicholson, Art Jones, Miriam Parker, rebeca medina, Merche Blasco, Amirtha Kidambi, Rachel Bersen, etc. They/she has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette Intermedium, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, The Clemente, FiveMyles, mh PROJECT nyc, to mention a few.