We will be streaming live public performance from around the globe with artists from Canada, Ghana, Spain, Switzerland and US in collaboration with Experimental Sound Studio. The artists include Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Canada) in collaboration with Mar Serinya (Spain), Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi (Ghana), CV Peterson (Wisconsin), Sara Zalek (Chicago, US) & Sheila Toledo Ribes (Switzerland). These artists come from a diversity of performance backgrounds encompassing dance forms from ballet to butoh, the artistic study of glass and fine art, to ritual and performance art. Indigenous research and ancient Ghanese rituals encompass the range of investigation these artists are exploring both individually and collectively.

Vanessa and Mar were invited to create a collaborative performance for this evening by the Director of Out of Site, Carron Little. Sara, CV, Va-Bene and Sheila are working on solo performances, however through our collectively conversations and practice mutual concerns and research is being formed and may come alive in the creative process.

These artists were co-curated by Martine Viale, ieke Trinks, Allen Conkle, Jeremy Pauly, Amy Sinclair and Wannapa P-Eubanks. All artists will be talking together on August 29 as part of a culminating program of Out of Site Chicago 2020.

Tune in & DONATE to the artists at:
ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts

About the artists
Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] (Ghana)
Pronoun: “sHit”
Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] works internationally and lives in Kumasi, Ghana.
sHit is a multidisciplinary “artivist”, founder and artistic director of perfocraZe International
Artists Residency (pIAR). As a performer and installation artist, crazinisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts, sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalized groups or individuals. With rituals and a gender-fluid persona, sHit employs sHits own body as a thought-provoking tool in performances, photography, video, and installations, ‘life-and-live-art’ confronting issues such as disenfranchisement, social justice, violence, objectification, internalized oppression, anti-blackness, systemic indoctrination and many more.
crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe including countries such as Nigeria,
Togo, Ghana, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, Cape Verde, USA, Spain,
Brazil, France and UK

Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Canada)
Vanessa is a Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse artist. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an MFA in performance. She has exhibited across Canada and the US in the fall of 2020 Dion Fletcher is a Jackman Humanities Institute Fellow.

CV Peterson (Eau Claire/Chicago)
CV is a mad-scientist storyteller who explores human-caused environmental devastation. They’ve exhibited at spaces such as CICA Museum, S. Korea; Shanghai Zhu Qizhan Art Museum, China; Out of Site Chicago, USA; and The Performance Arcade, New Zealand. They are the Founder/ Executive Director of Envisage Art Retreat.

Scott Rubin (Chicago/US)
Scott Rubin is an interdisciplinary musician who interrogates relationships between sound and movement. His recent projects have involved interdisciplinary collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.

Cristal Sabbagh (Chicago/US)
Cristal Sabbagh is a teaching interdisciplinary artist influenced by film, history, politics, Butoh and improvised sound. In her performances, her goal is to embody transformational memories, challenge power structures, and awaken viewers senses. Cristal’s found that working with live improvised music has inspired her best work, which has become vital to her practice. She’s currently curating and performing in Freedom From and Freedom To, an improvisational, cross-medium performance piece. It’s an opportunity to combine most of her creative interests in a risk-taking and vulnerable way. It uses an ensemble of dancers and improvising musicians that are remarkably diverse in their approaches to dance, instrumentation, and backgrounds. She’s a core member of Marie Casimir’s Djasporas dance collective, seen at the Instigation Festivals in Chicago & New Orleans over the past four years. For the past three years, she’s also been a member of Move Move Collaborative, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mar Serinyà Gou (Spain)
Mar is a visual artist and performer born in Catalonia (Spain) in 1986. PhD in Fine Arts and MA from the University of Barcelona. Her passion is to study the rhythms of the human body, the nature and the society and how they can live together in harmony.

Sheila Toledo (Switzerland)
Sheila is constantly searching for the condition of freedom that the human being was born
with. Through mirror glass she reflects her own never-ending stream of questions. Possibly these questions and reflections are a dialectical confrontation between the vision of the world and the one’s own internal construction. An incessant duality that makes us human.

Sara Zalek (Chicago/US)
Sara Zalek (they/them/we/us) is a performing artist and facilitator. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and hybrids, their work challenges the capitalist quest for the eternal elixir, and asserts that disruption has the ability to create social and ecological change.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Allen Conkle, amy sinclair, Chicago, CV Peterson, Experimental Sound Studio, ieke Trinks, jeremy pauly, Mar Serinya, Martine Viale, Out of Site 2020, Random Acts, Ravenswood, Sara Zalek, Sheila Toledo Ribes, Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi, Wannapa P-Eubanks