Our Sacred Noise in Street Light Shadows

Our Sacred Noise in Street Light Shadows

Live performance by Radio Healer

Friday, October 20, 2017
7:00 – 9:00 PM

Radio Healer, a Native American and Xicano-led performance ensemble founded in the Southwestern United States, will present a sound performance by two of the collective's artists, Cristóbal Martínez and Meredith Martínez. Our Sacred Noise in Street Light Shadows consists of six newly commissioned compositions that are composed for five handmade electronic instruments, three Mexican ocarinas, a conch shell, and a Pueblo elk whistle. They perform the wailing cry of La Llorona as she is carried by pedestrian currents that flow through the nighttime streets of San Francisco. Listen to the sacred sounds of frenetic capitalism and its byproduct hallucinations of laughter, violence, and dreams. Imagine the hypnotic momentum of the manipulations of the unseen hand of power-holders.

Cristobal Martínez writes, “I grew up in a pueblo in Northern New Mexico situated next to the Rio Grande. The flow of the streets are currently the closest thing in my life here in San Francisco that resembles a river. Although the streets and an actual river are two different things, they both reflect complicated ecologies that make them inter-relatable as metaphors of each other. The work is a lament of the economic transformations that are occurring in San Francisco, and the devastating impact they are having on the cultural memory of the city, and her many peoples who are often forced to migrate away from their traditional neighborhoods. Our Sacred Noise in Street Light Shadows is a multi-faceted metaphor, reflecting the lack of capacity of the liberal and gentrifying discourses to resolve the issues of poverty, homelessness, and colonization in the city. This metaphor reflects a city undergoing uncertainty, nervousness, tension, and stress.”

Meredith Martínez is a fiction writer. Her work focuses on formal and topical problems of time, intimacy, violence, and lyricism in narrative. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is completing a novel. She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Cristóbal Martínez is an artist and published scholar. He has been a member of the interdisciplinary artist collective Postcommodity since 2010, and founded the artist-hacker performance ensemble Radio Healer in 2003. As a solo and collaborative artist, Cristóbal positions metaphors to mediate complications within sites of dromological, spatial, social, cultural, political, ecological, and economic anxiety. Within these locations, Martínez often aestheticizes complexity to engage publics in co-intentional generative inquiry and deliberation for recovering and connecting knowledge. By creating work that engages human dilemmas, taboos, fears, desires, and contradictions, he intends to catalyze opportunities for publics to experience tranformations that move beyond the human instinct to simplify. More at www.cristobalmartinez.net.