Camino En El Mundo Aleatorio "And Welcome Others' [Words] To Their Final Home by Sana Rabia

'Camino en el mundo aleatorio… “and welcome others’ [words] to their final home' is an improvisational poetry walk piece created for the project ALL I SEE in collaboration with composer Ricardo Massari Spiritini. ALL I SEE is a platform for transmedial practice. Several elements such as postcards, time-lapse videos, and improvisational poetry walks are part of ALL I SEE. I designed the postcards with the photographs I took in Forest Park during the first 9 months after the NYC lockdown for the Covid 19 pandemic. I mailed the postcards to old and new friends and colleagues which allow me to connect during these distanced times using the USPS service (under attack around the same time).

The statement "538 acres once inhabited by the Prockaway, Delaware and Lenape Indigenous People" is found on each postcard picturing a beautiful place and controlled space where violence had occurred. I was photographing, recording, meditating while walking on subscribed trails in a park that was Rockaway and Lenape peoples’ territory until 1635. I thought about the "Trail of Tears" in the 1830's and the "Indian Removal" that still prevails in other forms of disenfranchisement and cultural annihilation in these United States.

Thinking about sound as a destination for my improvised words, I have created 4 routes, 4 caminos, 4 improvisational poetry walks in Forest Park, located in Lenapehoking, with my friend Riccardo Massari Spiritini. Together we thought about my walks in Forest Park as Recurridos de estilo.

This one is my improvisational walk number one! It represents the path to Ogún, my orisha from the Afro Cuban Pantheon, and includes the segmented line from Lewis Latimer's poem ix "and welcome others to their final home".

The most important part is that I could finally use the partiture or rhythmic notes (half picture on the slide). I found them thrown away on the street during one of my visits with my mother in Havana. The rhythmic component of the piece is based on one passage from Afro Cuban rhythms compiled by Milián Galí Riverí. All his annotations/compositions are for batá drums. Los tambores Batá are sacred drums played in Yoruba religious ceremonies in Cuba.

Riccardo replaced the drums with his invented instrument, the tarcordium, for my improvisational poetry walk that also references the opposite of open spaces --like prisons and asylums- "welcoming some but not others".

For this iteration of the project, 2 enlarged postcards have been printed on a banner now hagged on the Lewis Latimer House Museum fence as part of the exhibition My Soul Will Be A Star – The Resilience and Creativity of Our Immigrant Communities opening this Friday, April 23!

The curatorial work for the exhibition is by performance artist and sculpture Elizabeth Velázquez. The exhibition includes the works of poets and artists Sherese Francis and Keisha-Gaye Anderson. The African Voices also joined this effort!