STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES 

Please join us in welcoming the artist, choreographer and dancer Awilda Sterling, and artist, poet, curator and professor Phanuel Antwi to the SAVVY house! Their residency stays open our project STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES which investigates the contours of the history of the United States as well as the hegemonic narratives that form and uphold it. We are studying the ruptures caused by these narratives in an effort to unearth, or perhaps invoke the stories that may fall or take form between the cracks. 

We are honoured to have Phanuel and Awida in the SAVVY house and to have the opportunity to reflect, to share and exchange on their varied practices. These two-week micro-residencies are also an opportunity for both to get to know each other’s work as well as the work and research of SAVVY Contemporary and the environment that we operate within. We are actively experimenting on the different ways in which we can use this format to build on and tap into their respective performative and discursive practices, and as a result, the presentations will also be a moment of performative and discursive experimentation. We warmly invite you to come and experiment with us.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey is an experimental, independent, and multidisciplinary artist that works and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sterling-Duprey’s work explores identity, gender, diaspora, language, and migration, challenging conventional notions of cultural, national, and gendered boundaries. Her work intertwines marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibilizing of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinarity and feeding from Yoruba Caribbean traditions, Sterling-Duprey transgresses the boundaries between drawing, painting, and performance through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts traditions. She is a founding member of Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. Recent group exhibitions include Puerto Rico Negrx, curated by Marina Reyes Franco & María Elena Ortíz, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), San Juan, PR; no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, curated by Marcela Guerrero, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Whitney Biennial: Quite as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Cimarronas: artistas negras y afrodescendientes, Museo Casa Escuté, Carolina, PR; Untitled II, Kilometro 0.2, San Juan, PR.

Phanuel Antwi is an artist, an organizer, a curator, and an associate professor of English concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy, and struggle. He works with text, dance, film, and photography to intervene in artistic, academic, and public spaces. Dr. Antwi holds a Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His recent book, On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace, is from Pluto Press. He is currently finishing a manuscript called Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.