Kalunga XR - Extended Reality
Kalunga XR – Extended Reality
Bianca Turner & Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
Audiovisual Performative Art – 2024
About the artwork
“Kalunga XR – Extended Reality” is inspired by the symbology of the word Kalunga, present in the Bakongo Cosmogram (dikenga dia Kongo). The cosmogram is a representation of a life path, between the human and spiritual worlds. Kalunga means the sea. The sea is called the “Big Kalunga ” and the burial-grounds are called the “Small Kalunga”. The concept is to reflect on the meanings of the word Kalunga nowadays in relation with the transatlantic trade of enslaved people and the Afro – Diaspora that resulted from it. During this journey many people died or committed suicide on the sea. In that moment of history the sea “Big Kalunga” had both symbolic functions: The sea itself, a place of transition in life and burial-grounds a place of transition after life.
Looking for Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, decolonial artistic practices and deepening the matters of archive, ancestry, temporality, heritage and belonging. The work has an interdisciplinary perspective exploringing how embodied experiences are translated or transformed when they are transmitted through media forms like performance, video, sound, installation and augmented reality (AR). The main result is an immersive performance – installation which invites the audience in a journey overlaying digital content, creating multi-sensory experiences that blur the boundaries between performance, technology, and embodiment.
The creative process
The artistic collaboration brings together both artist’s researches intertwined, where the artists explore notions of archive, the expansion of time – space through audiovisual resources in relation to the body.
By using an interdisciplinary perspective, the artist’s practices explores a multisensorial archive of performative actions related to video mapping, sound, objects, photos and video, archives from the artist’s. The archival material unfolds an artistic practice related to ancestry, memory and history. The artists have been creating artistic material in places of slavetrade memory in Portugal, Benin and Brazil. The performative journey inside those archives, generates live performances that activate the space, objects, sounds, images and body- movement in real time.
About the artists
Bianca Turner’s work is interdisciplinary, between video performances, video installations, and videomapping. She holds a BA in ‘Performance Design and Practice’’ from Central Saint Martins (2011, London) and a Master’s in ‘Scenography’ from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (2013, London). Of particular note is her participation in BIENALSUR (Argentina, 2023), in the exhibition ‘Mulheres em Luta! Archives of Political Memory’, at the Memorial of Resistance of São Paulo, Brazil (2023), in the opening performance of the 34th São Paulo Biennial in 2020 in collaboration with Neo Muyanga and Collective Legítima Defesa, at the SSA Mapping Festival (Salvador, Bahia) in 2018 and 2023 with Jury Award and, at Rencontres Audiovisuelles #7 in Lille, France (2024) with Honorary Mention of the jury.
Luanda Carneiro Jacoel (BR/NO) is a performance artist working with the principles of ancestry, memory and temporality in the afrodiasporic body. The work crosses boundaries between dance, ritual, installation and video. Her work has been presented internationally in performance venues, exhibitions, artistic residences, artistic talks and performance – lectures. Currently, she is a PhD fellow in film and related audio-visual arts (FILMART) at Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA) and The Norwegian Film School (INN). In Brazil, she is director of Casa Sueli Carneiro a black institution, based on the activist and intellectual legacy of Sueli Carneiro, which is dedicated to welcoming black production, activism, reflections, critique and artistic expressions in Brazil and beyond its borders in dialogue with other Afro-Diasporas. Learn more
