A pelican’s subtly surreal arpeggioing of limbs is our entry into the visual for Nathan Schram’s 'Oyelo'. The aching insistency of Schram’s viola underscores this Kafka-esque flight into immediate intensity. From this image of a single bird, a haunting journey of individuation begins.
Multidisciplinary Artist, Ali Santana’s strobe-like animation creates fragmented patterns that move in a frenetic kaleidoscopic choreography. What seems at first disordered chaos gradually takes on the infinite lucidity of fractals, conjuring the intuitive mathematics of murmuration formations, African villages, cornrowed hair, and constellations.
Tension crescendoes as we move between light and dark; the sharp and the ephemeral; smoky and substantial. We are ultimately released from glitchy unreality to a colorfully undefined and beautiful beyond, and we fly in an astral network, ancestrally guided, before returning home.
This video art was created by Ali Santana as an artist in residence at Signal Culture.