CCS BARD

Artist: Donna Huanca

El Saturn Records’ founder Alton Abraham’s notebook sketches of an imaginary, multi-leveled El Saturn Cosmic Research Center – with an “El Saturn Wisdom Research Culture Art Foundation” and “Sound Department” – hold a special place in Afrofuturism’s history of sonic experiments. This exhibition was conceived with a speculative premise: what if the Center had actually come to fruition and continued to operate in our present context? Invited to contribute work to this imaginary site as a “sound scientist” is multidisciplinary artist Donna Huanca. She will create a sonic-installation testing the potential of her sound-based art practice and subjective investigations into her Incan-Andean ancestry. If El Saturn offered a relation between myth-science, counter-narratives and ideas of self-determination, Huanca takes up this relation in the context of sound technology and the gallery space. As a site for this interdisciplinary investigation, the gallery offers a dialogue between Huanca’s longstanding interest in the psychology of genetic memory, and the diasporic effects of heritage and ancestry. While the installation quotes histories of ethnographic display, sound will interrupt the temporal sequence of objects, creating a fragmented experience, but also producing alternate channels of narrative production and movement within the exhibition space. Stemming from explorations into national origins and feelings of cultural displacement, Huanca engages with cultural imaginaries and myths that for her are both present and absent. As Sun Ra once said, “The myth is neither bad nor good, its potentials are unlimited.”