Ayiti, island of mountains, where the Tainos, Arawaks, Marien, Magua, Maguana, Higuey, Xaragua and many others lived when christopher columbus set foot in 1492. 1492 marks the beginning of the genocide, the brutal extractivism of the many territories of Abya Yala, and the enslavement of African peoples in the triangulated trade.
For more than 500 years this european-imposed America has been defied. Among the multitudinous and ongoing revolts stands famous a dance gathering: a congress, Vodou ceremony and war council summoned by an African priestess that sparked the glorious and triumphant Haitian Revolution in 1791. A Revolution that is hidden to this day from the political imaginary of those who struggle for a planet where many worlds fit.
Cecilia Lisa Eliceche and Leandro Nerefuh want to learn from Haiti about anti-colonial resistance through and in the form of dance and cultivation. One is no one without others. Together and thanks to many great collaborators Cecilia and Leandro will make a work in honor of Ayiti, its richness, its dances, and its divine inhabitants. An homage to the island in the form of a dance poem. Diving in the deep waters of the Caribbean. Abismus invocatia Abismus.
For this occasion they will be joined by excellent guests Ogã Ton Tonsele from Salvador de Bahia and dancer Estelle Foli Adjo from Lome.
CONVERSATION GLORIA WEKKER
On Friday, November 8, there will be a conversation mediated by prof. Gloria Wekker, emeritus professor of Gender and Ethnicity at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, and winner of the Joke Smit prize 2017 for her contribution to women's emancipation in the Netherlands. Wekker is a social and cultural anthropologist with a specialization in the field of Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies.
