“I am all the things I have loved”.
This is the starting point for the third movement of ‘proclivity’, a nine-movement suite that mixes live looped instruments, interactive sound channels, light sculptures, gestures and multi-screen video projections.
Smythe combines recordings and footage of black people in the Mediterranean with live audience material to compose a powerful sensory experience, both tension and release. Proclivity: A.D.S.R. invites witnesses to reflect on their own experiences of connection, announcing a chorus of possibilities through dissonance.
SA Smythe is a critical theorist, educator and transmedia artist. His artistic practice combines poetry, score compositions, performance, and light sculptures to draw cartographies of black and trans (non-)belonging. Between exhibitions, workshops and festivals, his work is known both in Italy and abroad: winner of the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italianism, Smythe resides between Toronto, Italy, and the unceded land of the Tongva. He is now Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis.
SA Smythe is one of the winners of Birds of Passage, the #SameSameCall for residencies by BASE, Moleskine Foundation and ashikộ and curated by Mistura Allison.
The #SameSameCalls are promoted by BASE Milano, each time with different partners, to tell the story of plurality, including people of all ages, abilities, gender and race. Considering these four dimensions as a single intersection means weaving together the lives of some 8 billion people living on the planet and the need for a transversal and inclusive representation.
This project won the public call ‘Creative Living Lab – 4th edition‘, promoted by the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura Italiano.
