Medicine for the People is an offering back to the individual to initiate self-realization curated by Bianca Dominguez, Project Space Curatorial Fellow with:
Koyo
Tattfoo Tan
Raelyn Williams
ABOUT
A crucial concept for the relationship between a visionary to their reimagined world is the workings of their inner consciousness in conversation with embodied empowerment. Medicine for the People is an ongoing curatorial project that invites the public to see an individual and their inner consciousness as the microcosm of the collective they exist in, the macrocosm. Perceiving a symbiotic nature between inner consciousness and embodied freedom, within an individual and within a collective, is the guiding ethos.
Reimagining public art as a pathway for the community to become co-creators alongside the artist, through actively consuming, initiates the process of alchemized healing. Medicine for the People invites the public to engage with the act of consumption through art making and radical healing practices within a co-created collective space. The process of consumption or cannibalism, coined by Oswalde de Andrade, was a major component within Brazil’s revolution during the 1920’s and has the potential to guide us within our present day. Andrade, a Brazilian poet, created the Manifesto Antropófago and he states, “Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. In order to transform him into a totem. The human adventure.” Consumption of the “sacred enemy” translates now as consciously ingesting the oppressive forces that have transpired within the infrastructures that are the social institutions of modern America; including the health care system, the government, the educational institutions, ultimately, the pillars that sustain our reality. Consciously devouring the patriarchy, the colonized traces of white supremacy, American imperialism, and capitalism may offer a path of revolution.
Medicine for the People invites the public to engage through a virtual series focused on the intersectionalities of radical healing. Reimagining public art through incorporating workshops and interactive art pieces/ performances guiding the community in exploring their inner consciousness and manifested self is another guiding force of the event. I refer to the event as a gathering to highlight the aspect of engagement, interaction, and communal work as participants will be invited to internal conquests, communal discussion, and creative exploration. A youth member from the AYO cohort will be chosen to facilitate a workshop inspired by the activity they created within their mini workbook. In addition, an artist and a healer will be chosen to offer their medicine incorporating the 4 components of holistic wellness; mind, body, spirit, and emotion. This space intends to provide a platform for BIPOC artists, health practitioners, and youth abolitionists to share their rituals, their practices, and their teachings spanning across the topics of ecological activism, political activism, mental health, social justice, spiritual development, and personal growth.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Karen Miranda Rivadeneira (Koyo) is an interdisciplinary artist, a visionaire, and walks the path of curandera. She was raised in the Pacific tropical south and the Ecuadorian Andes. Through her artistic and spiritual pursuits she has weaved a unique journey. Her medicine path is indebted to her mother, grandmothers, elders, ancestral spirits and the land that raised her. Her home has always welcomed the syncretic union of afro-indigi-latinx spiritual traditions. She has lived on and off with a medicine woman in the Ecuadorian Amazon for over a decade. She had her first initiation to shamanism there, where she learned about plant medicine, drum ceremony, tobacco readings, oracle reading, limpias, and vapores. Concurrently, she apprenticed in the Andes with a medicine woman who adopted her, teaching her the Andean way to awakened the original knowledge; from listening with your inner ear, reading the candle, cleansing the body/soul with smoke, fire dancing, fire cleansing, energy healing, to walking between light and night with joy and reverence. Koyo also apprenticed with an Aymara priest who introduced her to the Andean energetic movements and sun gazing. Ultimately, her goal is to share how to journey within and awaken the curanderx that lives in us, through humility, integrity, wisdom and creativity.
Tattfoo Tan is an artist who collaborates with the public on issues relating to ecology, sustainability and healthy living. His work is project-based, ephemeral and educational in nature. Follow him on Instagram @tattfoo
Raelyn Williams (she/her) currently works as a preventionist at the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance in Richmond, VA. Her work and passion is around youth justice and empowerment. Williams fights for liberation and abolition and believes in the power of art as a tool for social change. She believes that one of the steps toward abolition is recognizing and undoing the ways that we police others, most often the most marginalized members of our communities.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Bianca Rose Dominguez (1996) is an artist, a writer, and a medicine woman. Her work addresses the power in silence, the primitive and ancestral practices connected to humanity, and embodied practices of healing. Her multidimensional work begins as an internal meditation and a devotion to the Great Mystery, transforming into poetry, intuitive symbols, medicine books, visual images, site specific installations or collective ceremonies.The impermanence of life is a part of her work just as much as the materiality. She believes art is a way of being interwoven with life activating humanities consciousness.
She was a collaborative artist alongside Tanya Aguinia at the MAD Museum performing Performance Crafting: Backstrap Weaving in 2018.Her ceremonial art performances have been shown at Arts Gowanus in 2018 and in Staten Island at the Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art in 2019. Currently she is attaining a BA in visual arts at Columbia University and is EFA’s Project Space curatorial fellow.