Standing on the Corner. Screening
Practical information
- Tune in English
- Free admission
Event overview
Standing on the Corner is an Art Ensemble founded in 2014 by the Puerto Rican artist Gio Escobar. It takes different shapes and forms with up to 30 musicians, all of the African and Caribbean diaspora, and the music viscerally reflects on their experience. The group moves freely between jazz improvisations, excursions into dub, garage-noise, and hip-hop lo-fi collages and with a predilection for multidisciplinary presentations, they have produced musical, visual, and experiential works for Serpentine Galleries, Bourse de Commerce, The Kitchen, Gavin Brown Enterprise, The Studio Museum Harlem, and Performance Space New York.
In 2017 they published a mixtape, Red Burns, a freeform, hour-long, continuous track that becomes an experimental manifesto, made together with artists from their community in New York. Responding collectively to recent world events, it combines elements of jazz, rumba, soul, funk, and hip-hop, poetry and fictitious radio broadcasts, to create a vivid and sensory experience of everyday life in New York City. They have collaborated with musicians such as MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, Solange, and Danny Brown. At Haus der Kunst, the Ensemble will appear in a trio formation to stage two performances on Friday and Saturday evening.
Before the concert on Saturday, Standing on the Corner invites to a rare screening of The Sweet Atmosphere Phased at 120º and Went Blank! When The Universe Collapsed. The film opens as a lecture, proposing a theory on a new form of psychotherapy, an action-based method which attempts to reconcile geographic traumas, and address why such a disproportionate amount exists in one specific demographic of our society: people of the African diaspora. The central projection—and parallel dimension—in the film is a Flash animation of a meteor hurling toward Puerto Rico doomed to collapse the universe. As the meteor travels so does the passage of time where many voices of this crumbling dimension are heard; the final thoughts, in the form of poetry, prayer, song, and incantations, of those inhabiting a world with no future. The Sweet Atmosphere journeys into that collective unconscious, landing somewhere between travelogue and therapy session.
Admission to the screening is free.
Curator Sarah Miles spoke with Gio Escobar, the ensemble's founder, about creative visions, inspiration and his experiences in Europe. The interview is available on our blog.
