We Lost Half the Forest and the Rest Will Burn This Summer

Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, stage a ceremony rooted in both indigenous and contemporary ritual. Postcommodity’s work uses experimental music to explore the destabilization of geographies and communities by global markets and colonization. Combining Western classical instruments with their own Southwestern rasquache electronics and regalia, this performance recounts the ever-cycling decay of a desert drought from the view of its flora and fauna.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.

Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2017), and Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2017-2018). The collective has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Contour the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image in Mechelen, BE; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, CA; 18th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, AUS; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, AZ; 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; documenta14, Athens, GR and Kassel, DE; and their historic land art installation Repellent Fence at the U.S./Mexico border near Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON. postcommodity.com

This program is part of the Citizen Lab programming series and takes place in the US Pavilion courtyard.