Lucifer Landing I
Lucifer Landing I is a new commission by Jonathan González created in collaboration with Rena Anakwe, Pamela Liou, and Nadia Schwartz Tykulsker. The project is the first in a series of works that conceptualize Blackness and post-anthropocentrism. In Lucifer Landing I, González takes the ideas of poet June Jordan and CHARAS as starting points to create an immersive environment in the VW Dome intended to function as an interactive model for sustainable living. Active in the Lower East Side during the 1970s, CHARAS was a collective founded on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, proposing geodesic domes as an alternative model for social housing.
The installation features an original score composed with Anakwe, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Johann Diedrick, GENG, and Rudy Gerson, which references celestial cosmologies; sound-responsive lighting design; and an original film by Liou documenting the creative process with excerpts from Chad Freidrichs' The Pruitt-Igoe Myth(2011) and Marlis Momber's Viva Loisaida (1978). In this work, González proposes that solitary dwelling within this space can be considered a choreographic action unto itself. Lucifer Landing I offers visitors a space to contemplate what González terms “the entanglements between the state of dispossessed non-being that is Black life with the non-human and the architectural.”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/5033
Lucifer Landing II draws intersections between black life and current geopolitical movements to imagine lateralized intimacy on a damaged planet. Informed by concepts championed by June Jordan, Buckminster Fuller and the Lower East Side Nuyorican collective CHARAS, González exhausts mechanisms of the ‘epic’ in human innovation and the theatrical conventions of classical opera to fathom the possibility of living and dying well.
https://www.abronsartscenter.org/program/world-premiere-jonathan-gonzalez-lucifer-landing-ii/