Propositions from the DeadWIP: tizita, from the feet up / aden
Wednesday, December 8th, at 8pm ET, 2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Sami Hopkins presents her third program in Propositions from the deadWIP, featuring multi-instrumental musician, singer, and composer aden. This performance is co-presented with The Chocolate Factory Theater, and was recorded at their theater in Queens, New York.
Propositions from the deadWIP is a multidisciplinary performance series that balances considerations of knowledge and fallibility launching from the premise that creative knowing imbues the process of making as much as a work’s eventual presentation or future iterations. By never claiming to reach finality, the works in this series accept the condition of being always “in progress,” with the potential to reimagine the status of a work-in-progress (WIP) altogether.
Notes from aden:
If we think of our bodies and selves as an ultimate creative project, always in progress,
— of memory, as what can never be fully formed of this project’s residues,
— of music, as a unique vessel by which bodily knowledge and experience is translated,
…in songwriting is a brief tapping into that circular, endlessly remade dimension, of what it means to be — we take moments that come to us as triggers and ghosts; we play with them & dress them in different clothing. And in this process is both clarity and continued confusion, of not just sound but of self — both definition and diffraction of life experience into the many possible directions.
Using the folk traditions and practices of song which inhabit my own body, I seek to explore the open space of eternal semi-finality that that songwriting — and the relics left in its wake — carves out of the psyche. I will reconsider and reimagine various sonic memories, environmental and creative recordings accumulated through my past, wielding voice, piano, and electronics as technologies with which to unravel and be unraveled by this autoarchive.
Eden Girma — also known as aden — is a multi-instrumental musician, singer, and composer. Hailing from Madison, WI but of no particular home; grown at the nexus of many artistic traditions, drawing from it all to create and perform music that not only resonates with individual hearts, but brings people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy.
Sami Hopkins is an artist, musician, and writer based in Queens, NY. She was a Recess Critical Writing fellow (Fall 2020), and she is an alumna of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum (Fall 2019 cohort). Her most recent writing can be found in Studio Magazine.
