S.1 Episode 3 // The Urgency of Art and Life: Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi + Anya Miller

What is the role of the artist, the power of silence, and the necessity of activism in fraught social worlds? In this episode Ghanaian artist, curator, and organizer Va Bene Elikem-Fiatsi and Anya Miller speak about life and death, sound and silence, action and stillness. It is designed for the listener to feel the urgency with which Va Bene performs and lives, and it forces the listener to understand how performance art and life become inseperable.

This season was produced in connection to 2023 exhibit, "Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America", an AAMP and PAFA collaboration curated by Dejay Duckett (AAMP), Judith Tannenbaum (PAFA), Mekhala Signal (PAFA), Michael Wilson (AAMP). This exhibit brings together 20 artists to respond to the question: Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy? The exhibit runs March 23 through Oct 8 of 2023 at the Historic Landmark Building in Philadelphia. 

For episode extras, and to learn more about the artists, hosts, and organizations involved, check out the Reckoning and Repair website: rnrphilly.com

Reckoning and Repair is part multimedia counter-archive, part laboratory, for telling stories and listening to stories in cities. Each season traces stories of resistance to (and repair from) the enduring and specific legacies of exclusion/withholding/erasure that haunt our cities. Through immersive oral histories and collaborative storytelling, student scholars, activists, and creatives illuminate the slow, difficult, yet vital work of accountability and healing in haunted worlds. The project is directed by Dr. Alissa Jordan at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennyslvania. ​