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          ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNANA! Trance Hall XXX -  Performance Installation

As part of ongoing visual treatise on the construction of black and performance of gender, Abrarax Mandigo-Punana! Trance Hall XXX, explores the construction of black as it relates to movement and (hyper)sexuality particularity in within the Berlin club scene.  

Participants were invited to indulge in the erotic-exotic-illicite nature of grooving to afrocentric-house and trance music.  In the piece I’m hoping to induce the transient state that is supposedly indicative of the black body’s hypnotic sexuality. The music was produced through collaboration by Lagos Based DJ, Afrologic. (mix below).

The subversive club reminiscent of a typical fetish Berlin nightlife, The setting is meant to convert usurp the mythos surrounding African movement and music. The physicality of blackness is often seen as communicated through dance, for a variety of reasons, 

 Chief among them being that Dance has been part of the communication of physical strength and fortitude. The conflation of these attributes, leave 'black bodies' invulnerable place in regards to citizenship, recognition, and belonging in the german state. Trance Club music, which has been linked to creating altered states of conciseness, can be liked to other the aching practice of dance as a means of breaching the supernatural and bring forth healing. 

In ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNUNA! TRANCE HALL XXX. I wear the stereotypes of blackness, as a black body and move, dressed as Black, in order to produce a state of consciousness that is beyond what has been constructed. While using the same mechanisms afforded in a club - music, heat, movement - I hope to include a transitory state, where previous patterns of thought are left behind.