Vocalist, composer, and writer Somi forges new ground with this experimental short film exploring the spiritual consequence of the global pandemic on creative practice. Like most people, Somi’s professional life was dramatically interrupted by COVID-19 and she found herself reflecting on the deep sense of personal vacancy felt in the absence of live performance. Partially narrated by Somi’s mother, this meditative film blends spoken word, art song, and movement with deconstructed concert recordings from Somi’s new Grammy-nominated live album, Holy Room—Live at Alte Oper with Frankfurt Radio Big Band, and registers what Somi calls “the emotional vibration and undemocratic fragility of cultural space and the living stage.” The piece aims to frame the disruption of otherwise quieted cultural spaces as a larger metaphor for the work most American arts institutions still need to do in service of Black storytelling.
This free first look at the work-in-progress film in the absence of things on December 1 was followed by a conversation with Somi; the director of the film, Mariona Lloreta; and Obie Award-winning Artistic Director of New York City’s National Black Theatre (NBT) Jonathan McCrory to discuss the meaning of the film, the collaborators’ creative process, and the role of Black artists during and beyond COVID-19.
Somi Kakoma
Somi Kakoma was born in Illinois to immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda and has built a career of transatlantic storytelling. Known simply as ‘Somi’ in the jazz world, her last studio album, Petite Afrique, is a song cycle about African immigrants in the midst of a gentrified Harlem in New York City, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album.
Mariona Lloreta
Mariona Lloreta is a Spanish-American interdisciplinary artist working internationally in film, painting, and dance. Mariona’s work celebrates the universal thread that binds our human experience as it examines the fine line between presence and absence, wholesomeness and brokenness, past, present and future.
Photos: Anna Longworth, J. Quazi King