Luna Olavarria Gallegos

A set of digital and physical objects inspired by local music scenes across the Black Atlantic, which offer decentralized methods of distributing and consuming music.

http://lunaog.global/house-party-federation.html

Description

“The triangle trade” is a historical term referring to the exchange of enslaved people and sugar cane between Africa and the Americas, which has evolved into the Atlantic trade infrastructure of the 21st century. What happens if we think about the triangle trade as an exchange of culture, not of just bodies and sugar? Through complicating this trade, new vectors are revealed and the boundaries of Euclidean geometry within trade routes become impractical to the reality in which we all live.

Through research of the music industry, as well as local music scenes in Colombia, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Nigeria and Panama throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, I demonstrate the ways in which the current music distribution and consumption infrastructure has failed artists in the very places which birthed pop-culture trends and I offer alternatives. I propose that the introduction of the Internet did not solve issues of connection of artists with other artists, but rather created new ways of obstructing conversation of diaspora.

HOUSE PARTY FEDERATION is an archive of physical and digital objects and knowledges that recognize a greater Black-Atlantic network for what it is: a collection of places / times that constantly produce global pop culture. The project re-imagines what the triangle trade means to us. This is the most realistic place because it is the place in which all the conditions for our art have been created —the space in which we are not slaves, but Gods— creators of not only food, buildings and railways, but also culture.

Classes

Thesis