current projects work progressing

Started in the 90s and still going strong, Tsikaya - Músicos do Interior consists in recording folk musicians throughout the Angolan rural areas. The renewed website is worth a visit and there's Huambo Musica Sessions, a new CD out now. The Tectonik:TOMBWA  project is a reconstruction of the research done by a young Angolan anthropologist who vanished in the desert of Namibe during the Cold War. The most recent project is the multimedia opera 3thousandRIVERS with research and filming in the rain forests of Colombia and Brazil and its world premiere in May 2016 at the Grand Auditorium of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. There's even a striving educational program for children such as Pangeia Kids that's been implemented in many parts of the world. Children are given the opportunity to have a hands on approach to music by building their first musical instrument.

TSIKAYA - MÚSICOS DO INTERIOR

Tsikaya - Músicos do Interior is a music project that invites composers and musicians in the rural areas of Angola to participate in a digital platform enabling their music to be promoted and shared with a global audience.

Field recordings are regularly performed by local teams in each province contributing to a growing digital archive of traditional as well as contemporary music. Tsikaya has taken place in the provinces of Cuando-Cubango, Benguela, Huíla, Cunene and Huambo and aims at covering the whole national territory.

Currently the project also hosts a sample of old music archives collected by Ulrich Martini in Andulu, Bié, from 1969 to 1973 and, soon to be added, by Diamang in the provinces of Lunda and Moxico in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

An exchange project with the Colombian Foundation Mas Arte Mas Acción allowed us to expand the experience of this project and work with afro-Colombian musicians along the rivers Guapi, Napi and Timbiqui on the Pacific coast of Colombia, originating the Colombia Sound Map.

Initiated in 1997 by Victor Gama, Tsikaya is produced by PangeiArt in partnership with União Nacional dos Artistas e Compositores, UNAC.

3thousandRIVERS voices in the forest

The new project is based on fieldwork in the rain forests of Amazonia, El Choco and the Andes in Colombia and Brazil. It addresses the destruction of that particular environment as well as the beauty of its nature and the lives of its inhabitants. Gama and local teams gathered field research through photography, video, sound and interviews with people living in those rain forests such as teachers, musicians, community leaders and more to structure a composition written for orchestral musicians, his own musical instruments, and singers.

While its world premiere happened in May 2016 in Lisbon, the current project aims at producing and presenting the complete work in the Amazon close to the communities we've worked with.

tectonik:TOMBWA

the project was initiated by Victor Gama in the desert of Namibe, Angola, in 2006 with the aim of reconstructing and interpreting professor Augusto Zita's research thesis “An anthropology of Utopia: formation of Utopian identities”. The project is based on his fragmented notes, and is intended to resurface his thoughts, concepts and analysis. For that aim Gama started an archive of some of the main items pointed out by prof. Augusto such as recordings of sounds collected with a specific device, photographs and videos of several features along the road from Namibe to Tombwa, as well as a collection of objects found laying on the ground, different types of sands, dryed leaves of plants and many other items.

The archive has now grown to quite a reazonable size and has expanded to incorporate new field sites in South Africa and Antarctica. New field trips are programmed for 2014 and beyond and work on the present archive is ongoing in order to understand and explain some of the concepts that prof. Augusto developed such as, for instance, the concept of 'dark space'. Other important concepts include that of a new time/space system where light is included as a third dimension.

PANGEIA KIDS Building your first musical instrument

Pangeia Kids is an exciting workshop where kids can build, decorate and play their own instruments. Additionally the workshop can include their parents or it can be tailored for older kids. Several different types of musical instruments can be built: the thumb piano or kissange, an African instrument made out of a wooden box and wooden keys that can be plucked; the noisy wheel, an instrument made out of a flexible tube with a little marble ball inside; the txiumba an instrument derived from a traditional instrument from Angola, with a wooden box, three bows and strings, usually known as a pluriharp.

 

© Victor Gama

Skype:  vegeacustico     victorgama@pangeiart.org

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