Diogenes stories8/14/2023 ![]() ![]() Because of our 550+ years of colonialism that have sought to re-appropriate Indigenous and African knowledges, “Sentinelas de la luna nueva” functions as an eco-ancestral custodian of the story of the Old Griot. The custodian of this knowledge then appears before us in a newer form, Sentinelas de la luna nueva (New Moon Sentinels, 2022-2023), its design informed by the post-human guardianship philosophy of mangroves. Eventually, The Old Griot will take us to a coconut-like unbranched ‘memory lane’ in “Talegas de la memoria” (2020), in which a video shows the stories of colonialism brought to the present. Like a conjunto, each artwork has an ‘instrument’ that suggests the sounds of a siren, a trumpet blow, a ring, an alert, or a conversation in Loíza during a community gathering, a bomba event, across an alcapurria stand, etc. The video “Tocones” (2019) sets the rhythm for the story that The Old Griot will tell through sculptural assemblages. annexation (1898), one of the first Indigenous insurrections in the Americas (1511), the establishment of Haiti as the first Black Republic in the Americas (1804), and many other sacos of ‘time,’ crowned by a saco that represents Black resistance to the British Armada’s attempt to conquer the Spanish Caribbean (1797). A boat is surrounded by branded coffee sacos (coffee bags) with years of historical events ‘arriving’ to the shores of the town of Loíza in the archipelago of Puerto Rico or Boriquén (its Taíno-Indigenous name). These branded sacos portray the year of Spanish colonization (1493) and U.S. "El Viejo Griot” (The Old Griot, 2022-23) welcomes us to the space magnificently, setting the tone of this worldly voyage. Ultimately, El Viejo Griot tells a truly global history by genuinely engaging with histories of the Global South and without claiming the universality imposed by imperialist, Eurocentric narratives. The 2021 McArthur “Genius” Fellow assembles an evocative story with material art language from his Loíza community, while centering an Afro-Indigenous worldview that expresses a world history of imperialism and colonization, Black beauty and resistance, (climate) disaster and renewal, and the global pandemic. There is a quest for new aesthetic forms of orality, and the questioning that ensues: what is the place of orality in the contemporary sphere? Is orality an architecture of language? Is this important for the survival of the human species? A lure? A fiction.”įollowing in the griot tradition of West Africa, Daniel Lind-Ramos reconstructs an expansive world history that originates in Loíza, Puerto Rico in his solo exhibit El Viejo Griot: Una historia de todos nosotros at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. “As a ‘Griot’ I bring historic events from the past to the present, in a kind of timeless syncretism where the future would be perpetually remodeled by our past actions.
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