Earth | A Saturday Convening

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant unfolds as four Saturday convenings, featuring invited artists whose practices engage Glissant’s thinking, their collaborators and communities, and special musical guests. These gatherings respond to earth, fire, water, and winds through dialogue, shared poetics, and polyvocality.

We begin with earth on Saturday, March 14 at 4pm, considering landscape, geography, histories, territory, rootedness. A member of CARA’s curatorial team opens the afternoon with a reading from Glissant.

Adama Delphine Fawundu; her mother, Maria Tita Valcarcel; and a group of multidisciplinary artists—che ali, darylina powderface, and Niama Safia Sandy—come together for a participatory invocation, a meditation, a calling for our ancestors to open the way forward.

Mek We Pul Sära
Come with your heart and your deepest wishes.
We will pour for the ancestors and back into our bodies, the earth, as one.

Cultivating an atmosphere of collective listening, the program concludes with an improvisational performance by bassoonist Joy Guidry with percussionist Tcheser Holmes.

Earth invites shared attunement to cycles of life and renewal, grounded in memory and attention to place.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a visual artist, educator, and cultural organizer whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in photography and expanded through textiles, video, sound, handmade paper, and found and organic materials. Central to her work is what she terms Kpoto Patchwok, a methodology grounded in ancestral intelligence, embodied memory, and ecological knowledge. Through this approach, she explores how stories are carried, preserved, and transmitted through our bodies, landscapes, and material culture.

che ali (buford) is an experimental interdisciplinary artist based in new york city. che primarily performs and creates music as a violinist and composer, while also integrating objects, voice, movement, and poetry. their practice often deals with themes of memory, place, and the quotidian, exploring humanness through a somatic lens and in dialogue with poetic possibility and conceptual inquiry. their work is deeply interested in the exposure of timbral details, resonance, introspection, interiority, and starkness, realized through improvisational performance, acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. che has collaborated with artists including Adama Delphine Fawundu, Deborah Jack, Torsten Lang, Dafna Naphtali, and James Ilgenfritz. They have received commissions from Midori, The Museum of Modern Art, icarus Quartet, Castle of our Skins, Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy, and others.

darylina powderface is a multidisciplinary artist from the stoney nakoda and siksika nation. she offers an influential exploration of indigenous identity and perspective, investigating spatial and temporal realities through a nakoda and blackfoot lens, and using her art to embody memory, knowledge, and lived experience. her creative process is deeply connected to storytelling traditions, weaving past and present into immersive, transformative expressions. her work serves as both personal and collective reflection, honoring the resilience, strength, and beauty of her communities while pushing the boundaries of contemporary artistic practice. she is a 2026 mfa candidate, at columbia university school of the arts, in the visual arts program.

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, cultural anthropologist, curator, organizer, and educator. Her creative practice across disciplines explores the human story—through the critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race, and ritual. Niama’s aim is to leverage history and the visual, written, and performative arts to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them. Together artists and audiences are lifted to a higher state of historical, ontological, and spiritual wholeness in the process. Past residencies include The Last Resort Artist Retreat, The Watermill Center, 37d03d, and Ma’s House. As a curator and writer, she has shown and worked with artists including Adama Delphine Fawundu, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Ja’Tovia Gary, Tsedaye Makkonen, Dindga McCannon, Basil Kincaid, Milford Graves, Nate Lewis, Zak Ovè, and others.

Maria Tita Valcarcel was born in Equatorial Guinea in 1943. She was raised in Freetown, Sierra Leone and is known within the American Sierra Leonean community for her nourishing and delicious meals prepared with love and care. Maria will prepare ancestral ritual food for the collective meditation at CARA.

Joy Guidry is a bassoonist, versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling; Joy’s music channels her inner child in honor of her ancestors and predecessors. The San Diego Tribune has hailed her performances as “lyrical and haunting…hair-raising and unsettling.” Joy was born in Houston, Texas, into a creative family that has shaped who she is today.

Tcheser Holmes is a dynamic drummer from New York, deeply rooted in Brooklyn’s Afro-centric culture. Raised amid the city’s vibrant mix of rock, house, hip-hop, and jazz, he began his musical path playing djembe with African drum ensembles before transitioning to drum set, where he found his voice through jazz and improvisation. After attending the New England Conservatory, Tcheser has since become a vital force in New York’s creative music scene. He tours internationally and records extensively with the acclaimed free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements (featuring Moor Mother), while continuing to perform with an impressive roster of artists including Aquiles Navarro, Jaimie Branch’s C’est Trio, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Terri Lyne Carrington, Marshall Allen, Nicole Mitchell, Isaiah Collier, Alabaster DePlume, Joy Guidry, and Melvin Gibbs, among many others.