festival:festival 2018 Opening Night Party

This event took place on Aug 10, 2018

To maximize accessibility, all programming this year will be free and open to the public!

All programs will happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, at Northwest Film Forum and LoveCityLove.

About

festival:festival is an arts presenting platform focusing on Seattle artists and practices that engage with intersectional structures and identities. The mission of the festival is to create vibrant spaces through creative frameworks of empowerment, healing, and intentionality with the goal of building a sustainable and accessible arts community.

festival:festival brings together and celebrates live music, performance, theatre, dance, visual arts, panel discussions, workshops, and other creative presentations removing the barriers that often separate the arts into genre-specific venues and programming.

 

August 10 Opening Night Programming

 

6:00-8:00pm: Festival Reception with lobby installation entitled Ok, Get Rid of It All by Chelsea Rodino:

 

Description: 

These creations are on ongoing exploration of growth through devastation. Thinking about the ideas of home, feeling stuck, and what to hold onto and let go. Seeking contentment and beauty within chaos. In this creation there was no planning, everything just happened.

 

Artist Statement:
Chelsea Rodino generates new things utilizing a boundless range of materials and emotions. Through out her work she is continually drawn to the ideas surrounding human connection, memory, self, movement, present time, and the unconventional. While in the midst of continually learning and unlearning, Chelsea finds the process of creating to be where the most fruitful notions grow. She moves through the creative process with no clear plan, just being as present and honest as possible

 

7:00pm: Film Showcase featuring:

 

Hanan Diriye’s The Mask (2018) 
Hanan Diriye is a poet and storyteller currently residing in the pacific NW. Her work is influenced by her experience as a black woman, 2nd generation American and diaspora of Somaliland.
Kamyar Mohsenin’s Bookworm (2018)
A visual portrait/documentary of Philadelphia musician Jahmir Marks, also known as BookWorm. Premiered at the Seattle Central Student Film Festival and publicly on May 25th, 2018.

 

 

Photo credit: Cameron Fletcher


OPENING NIGHT ARTISTS

Chelsea Rodino

Chelsea Rodino generates new things utilizing a boundless range of materials and emotions. Throughout her work she is continually drawn to the ideas surrounding human connection, memory, self, movement, present time, and the unconventional. While in the midst of continually learning and unlearning, Chelsea finds the process of creating to be where the most fruitful notions grow. She moves through the creative process with no clear plan, just being as present and honest as possible.

Hanan Diriye

Hanan Diriye is a poet and storyteller currently residing in the pacific NW. Her work is influenced by her experience as a black woman, 2nd generation American and diaspora of Somaliland.

Kamyar Mohsenin

Kamyar Mohsenin, 20 years of age, is an artist, filmmaker, and student from Santa Cruz, California, currently living in Seattle, WA.


festival:festival is partially funded through an Art Projects grant from 4Culture. Help pay festival:festival artists, curators, and organizers through their Kickstarter fundraising campaign with a tax-deductible donation, made here.


ADDITIONAL FESTIVAL ARTISTS

Dandy (David Rue & Randy Ford)
Déjà Speaks
Ben Gale-Schreck
Goodsteph
Guayaba
Christopher Paul Jordan
Simba Mafundikwa
Natasha Marrin
mmuumm
Matt Offenbacher
Khadija Tarver
+ more TBA!

COMMUNITY PARTNERS

LoveCityLove
Northwest Film Forum
secondnature
Youth In Focus

CURATORS

mario lemafa

mario lemafa

artist, poet, and community organizer
http://www.mariolemafa.com

Stories told of this city today suggest that its inhabitants measure time with harm, damage is currency, and that more so than rain, coping is the definitive weather feature. festival:festival bookends these tales with visions for a communal salve, highlighting artists work who come to us in good faith. I could not be more thrilled to help usher in ff’s 2nd year, a chance for cohesion, an opportunity to nurture an ever more vibrant arts community, and by extension, our communities.

mario lemafa (1990) is an artist, poet and organizer currently working in Seattle and living in South King County, Coast Salish lands. Their work engages with indigenous-diaspora dialectics, collectivist-individual relations, poetics, archiving, and recognition. A 2016 Stranger Genius Award nominee, lemafa has shown in group and solo exhibitions with the occasional curatorial effort.

Photo credit: mario lemafa.

Amina Maya

Amina Maya

designer and photographer
http://www.aminamaya.com

As a curator for festival:festival, I am currently interested in creating healing spaces, that celebrates unapologetic Blackness and expands the consciousness of those who interact with it. I am interested in changing the dynamic with which we interact with art and music to be less of an extraction and more of an energetic exchange.

Amina Maya is a designer and photographer whose work centers around documenting and celebrating the beauty of the African diaspora. With roots in both Sierra Leone and the United States, Amina draws upon the imagery, color, and patterns that define West African art as well as the rich, evolving art culture of Black America. Currently, her practice is focused on artistically healing from multi-generational trauma, connecting with spirituality and unearthing ancestral wisdom. Amina graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with a BFA in Visual Communications in 2018. Her work has been featured in PDN Edu and Lithium Magazine.

Photo credit: Yousuf Dirie.

Sara Porkalob

Sara Porkalob

arts-activist, playwright, performer, and director
http://www.saraporkalob.com

Sara Porkalob is an arts-activist, playwright, performer, and director based in Seattle. She’s been featured on City Art’s Future List, served as Intiman Theatre’s 2017 Co-Curator, and was one of the first recipients of a Village Theatre Original Writers Residency. She is a co-founder of DeConstruct, an online journal of intersectional performance critique. Dragon Lady, her first full-length work, has garnered a Seattle Times Footlight Award and Broadway World Award for “Best New Play” and in 2019, she will develop and perform her Dragon Cycle at American Repertory Theatre. This summer, she will produce a concert version of new musical The Lamplighter with collaborators Justin Huertas and Kirsten deLohr Helland.

Photo credit: Joshua Taylor.

Juan Franco

Juan Franco

Co-Founder & Organizer

Born in Bogotá, Colombia (1991), Juan learned creativity by example through the endless talents of their mother. As an artist and curator, they use art and its institutions to recover visual and literary methodologies to deconstruct systematic structures that damage their identities. They hold a BFA in Art (Summa Cum Laude) from Cornish College of the Arts. They currently live and practice in Seattle while pursuing a MA in Art History with a focus on Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practices at the University of Washington.

Carl Lawrence

Carl Lawrence

Co-Founder & Organizer

Carl Lawrence (b. 1992) is a Seattle-based artist and director whose work oscillates between performance, installation, and visual art. His work has been seen most notably with Seattle-based experimental theatre company Modern Recollections with whom he has presented work locally and nationally at venues such as The Watermill Center, On The Boards, Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Olson Kundig, Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival XIV, and Next Fest NW 2014. He will be presenting work at the ITINERANT Performance Festival curated by Hector Canonage at the Knockdown Center in New York in May 2018. He is also currently developing a new play entitled “aaaa” that will premiere at Base: Experimental Arts + Space in November 2018.


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Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave,

Seattle, WA 98122

206 329 2629


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