Mudfish

Abstract:

For Black Sacred Arts Conference, scholar, artist and heritage preservationist Viktor Le Givens and interdisciplinary cultural producer, healer and mystic Roman Norfleet co-facilitate a sonic eco ritual drama entitled Mudfish. Mudfish is an interdisciplinary sonic intervention featuring the musings of multi-instrumentalist Roman Norfleet of Be Present Art Group and Viktor le Givens of Southern Android Productions. The project is aimed to explore “how do we call in the sweet waters of change and transformation into our lives? More specifically what offerings and cultural algorithms must be devised in order to calibrate our social imbalances?

In the cultural archive of Benin West Africa the sacred mudfish is said to represent resilience, prosperity, peace, fertility, and primordial wisdom. During extreme drought the mudfish can traverse land and burrow into the mud as it then goes into a dormant state, or temporary death. When the rainy season comes, the mudfish emerges from its dormant state and begins to swim and animate the rivers again. Metaphorically the mudfish is often used to represent Afro Atlantic Spiritual consciousness, a well spring of energy that ebbs and flows depending on the climate and conditions of the time. It goes without question that we are in a time of drought, punctuated by global warming, political wars, financial instability and exacerbated natural resources.

Bios:

There is magic, reverence, and mystery in the spaces, objects, and writings of Viktor L. Ewing-Givens, a multimodal performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to re-con- textualize the seemingly mundane into the spectacularly sacred. Though the form is different, Givens’s work is a continuation and adaptation of the methods used by storytellers, like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, who find truth in their bodies and use the whispers of archaeological sites to piece together Afro-Atlantic pasts. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with precolonial and postmodern spiritual technologies, Givens works to fabricate spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory. He is the founding creative director of Southern Android Productions, an ongoing cultural research project that explores the healing and creative powers of ancestral archives.

Roman Norfleet (1988 n. American born) is an interdisciplinary cultural producer, healer and mystic that uses sculpture, music composition, performance and social organizing as instruments in exploring his committed interest in spiritual and social development.  Originally hailing from Lockport, Illinois, Roman’s formative years were spent immersed in the vernacular traditions of the Baptist Church where his parents Mose Ella and Rev. Robert Norfleet attended and provided Roman the foundation to seek spiritual enlightenment on his own. His development journey led him to Los Angeles where he lived in an Gaudiya Vaishnava Ashram and studied Hindu/ Vedic Philosophies of Swamini Turiyasangitanada (Alice Coltrane) with her students. These years of deep immersion into his spiritual practices greatly influenced the way Norfleet approaches music and provided expansive insight into the sacred power of sound.