Chanting spells

Please join us as we close our exhibition DESACTA the way we have opened it: in song and sound. We are grateful that Astan KA, Dudù Kouate and Mauricio Fleury are contributing there counter-spells to the exhibition altar against past and present violences. 

Astan KA  is a Berlin-based performer, singer, songwriter, experimental rapper, dancer, actress, and event-curator. Born in France with roots from Mali, she embraces a double culture that led her to consider herself as a “child of reconciliation.” Her musical style, “Gangsta Jazz,” blends vocal inspirations mainly from jazz, hip-hop, drill, trip-hop, slam/poetry/storytelling but also punk, desert blues and electronic sounds. She fronts Asphalt Djelis, sings with Sonic Interventions, and explores themes of love, protest, identity, and universality. Astan has performed in musicals, theater pieces, short-films and TV shows. She co-founded Cult-Sup, an event-series that push the afro-alternative art scene and ancestral knowledge.

Dudù Kouate is a musician & teacher. Born into a family of griots in Dakar, Senegal, Dudù inherited a rich musical tradition which he built on by learning to play over 200 traditional African instruments. As a key member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago since 2017, he’s recorded albums and graced prestigious stages like The Carnegie hall NY and many others around the globe. Based in Berlin after three decades in Italy, he conducts educational workshops internationally and collaborates with cultural institutions. His music, blending Afro free jazz with diverse influences, notably demonstrated in his album “Africation,” reflects his modern reinterpretation of griot traditions, while his versatility extends to cinema, theater, performance and poetry projects.

Mauricio Velasierra is a Colombian-born expert and pioneer of keyless Latin American wind instruments: quenas, sikus, and mohzeños. Besides developing techniques to play them fully chromatically he has also reimagined and rebuilt them, transforming the acoustic sound into animalistic distortion machines. A genre escape-artist, with a facility to improvise between worlds, Velasierra plays with an explosive directness that has taken his music to prestigious venues and festivals internationally. He is also a composer, renowned for his innovative and highly original style, which combines modern jazz, contemporary classical and progressive music influences. His work has been critically acclaimed by The Guardian, Songlines, The Wire and the German Record Critics Prize, among others.