Carmina Escobar: The Light That Heals
Tune in at https://indexical.org/stream!
A woman sitting in the middle of a room filters through her body the sounds of a past communal experience in Santa Cruz. The sound triggers the intensity of a light emerging from the body of the performer, inundating the room and the senses. In this moment in time, dislocated by isolation, and at a time of painful virtuality, The Light That Heals seeks to soothe and affect the audience’s perception using the poetic sonic action of memory and the possibilities of its transfiguration to envision possible futures.
This event will be streamed live from Wind River, a private studio in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and followed by a Q&A. Depending on the health circumstances, there may be the possibility of limited number of live witnesses; stay tuned to our email list for more information.
This is the third and final event of Carmina Escobar’s 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence engagement with Indexical, made possible with support from the City of Santa Cruz Arts Commission and an anonymous donor.
Carmina Escobar
Carmina Escobar is an experimental vocalist, improviser, and sound and intermedia artist. Her practice—comprising installation, performance, and multimedia projects—focuses on sound, the voice, and the body, and their interrelations with physical, social, present, and memory spaces.
Escobar has developed a range of vocal techniques that she applies to her creative practice and also to investigations of radical ideas and concepts regarding the voice. Having emigrated from Mexico to live and work in Los Angeles, key to her practice is the exploration of interstitial states of being—suspensions between worlds, between politics, and at borders. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant to present Mami in the exhibition Cantos Comunes/Common Chants at The Blockhouse in Havana, Cuba. This participatory and process-oriented piece was developed in the days leading up to the performance. Escobar used the idea of Mami Wata—a water deity venerated in West, Central, and Southern Africa—as an expression of diaspora, and to reference ideas of fertility and togetherness.
She has presented her work in Cuba, Europe, Mexico, and the United States including at Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway; Cuban Art Factory, Havana; CTM Festival, Berlin; and New Music Encounters + International Music Festival, Brno, Czech Republic. Her work FIESTA PERPETUA! a communitas ritual of manifestation (2018) was included in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Los Angeles. Her work has also been presented at the MexiCali Biennial, Pasadena; Machine Project, Los Angeles; MATA festival, New York; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and World Dada Fair, San Francisco, among others.
In 2016, Escobar received the Young Creators grant from the National Fund for Culture and Arts, Mexico and a grant from the National Center for the Arts, Mexico. Escobar completed an M.F.A. with a specialization in Voice Arts at California Institute of the Arts, where she is a professor.
Carmina Escobar:
The Light That Heals
A woman sitting in the middle of a room filters through her body the sounds of a past communal experience in Santa Cruz. The sound triggers the intensity of a light emerging from the body of the performer, inundating the room and the senses. In this moment in time, dislocated by isolation, and at a time of painful virtuality, The Light That Heals seeks to soothe and affect the audience’s perception using the poetic sonic action of memory and the possibilities of its transfiguration to envision possible futures.
Carmina Escobar is Indexical’s inaugural Summer/Fall 2019 Artist-in-Residence, and this is the first of three events she will engage in throughout the year. Escobar is an internationally active performer and creative artist, and has been teaching voice lessons and workshops for the past 16 years across the Mexico, USA, Europe, and Latin America. Currently she is a VoiceArts faculty member at CalArts where she facilitates experimental voice workshops, forums, contemporary repertoire, technique and performance practice as well as individual voice lessons.