Prelude (Sea Green Sea / Sidewalk of Clouds) with Lamin Fofana

On Saturday, February 14 at 5pm, join us in welcoming artist and musician Lamin Fofana back to CARA for Prelude (Sea Green Sea / Sidewalk of Clouds), an intentional listening and collective reading event engaging African diasporic writers. The program borrows its title from the opening track on Fofana’s album The Open Boat, leaving the door ajar and serving as a portal to a triptych of sound works that include Shafts of Sunlight and Ballad Air & Fire.

The artist’s work, rooted in historical awareness, often engages with the turbulence and uncertainty of the present. He crafts immersive, multisensory sound environments inspired by readings in Black Studies and the writings of seminal historians, poets, and theorists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Suzanne Césaire, and Aimé Césaire. This program at CARA invites listeners into a field of inquiry shaped by Fofana, transmuting key theoretical and poetic texts into sound.

The program approaches reading as a form of listening and observation through active engagement with sound and the surrounding environment. Pages or fragments from a body of texts are shared with the audience, inviting anyone to read aloud at any moment. The audience shapes a collaborative space that moves beyond passive reception, transforming the performance into a collective exploration of sound, thought, and presence.

Prelude cultivates an environment of critical reverie—an intentional listening space for dreaming, thinking, imagining, and giving voice to sound. Moments of irruption disrupt conventional flow or narrative, opening experiences of alternative listening and nonlinear forms of thought and perception. Performance, collective reading, and dialogue converge.

The program is presented as part of that that, which transforms CARA into an expanded bookstore environment. In the weeks preceding our spring exhibition of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s (1928–2011) personal art collection, we present a series of book launches, readings, and conversations shaped by the poetic force that animates Glissant’s chapter “That That” in his book Poetics of Relation.

Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician currently based in New York. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material. Fofana hosts a monthly radio show on NTS Radio.