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Novella Neruda Presents: An Afro’s Chimera | Tha Shrine of Tha Black Prima Donna

 

NOVELLA NERUDA

Lavotsky

JALEN ELK ✰

Noise Shrine

BONE STUDY

NOVELLA NERUDA PRESENTS: 

AN AFRO’S CHIMERA — THA SHRINE OF THA BLACK PRIMA DONNA 

EURYTHMY | QUIXOTIC QUICHE | PRIMORDIA   

A Black Dadaist rite. A fractured fugue of spectacle + spirit.⠀

Summoned through sonic revolt, ancestral glamour, and devotional film, Tha Shrine honors Tha Black Prima Donna as altar, cipher, and archive.

Here, the screen becomes sacred.

Time folds into rupture.

Myth is improvised.

This is Black Dadaism as dream logic, refusal, and ecstatic survival—a tempo of emergency where memory fragments, identity liquefies, and the surreal becomes sovereign.⠀

Venerate the surreal. Witness the spectacle. Enter the shrine.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door

Artists Bios

NOVELLA NERUDA

An Afro’s Chimera is an ongoing ritual-based sonic and visual installation series conjured by Novella Neruda—a multidisciplinary griot, disc-jockey, and curator whose work traces the entangled genealogies of Black pleasure, surreal memory, and sonic resistance. Following the inaugural performance Afrekete (2024), the second installment, Tha Shrine of Tha Black Prima Donna, deepens Neruda’s inquiry into Black Dadaism as both a speculative aesthetic and liberatory cosmology. Through a synesthetic interplay of sound, film, and performance, Neruda invokes the figure of the Black Prima Donna as a living altar—sacred, unruly, and eternally fugitive. Merging archival impulses with improvisational gestures, Tha Shrine transforms Elastic Arts into a ceremonial dreamscape where time ruptures, glamor becomes griot, and myth is both remembered and remixed. The installation continues Neruda’s commitment to cultivating spaces of Black imaginative sovereignty—where pleasure is protest, and sound becomes sanctuary.

Lavotsky

Chicago based artist focused on drum machines, romplers & synthesizers.



 

JALEN ELK ✰ - Detroit-born artist, Jalen Elk Star is a multifaceted filmmaker, music producer, playwright, and collagist, he often draws from controversial themes to craft modern avant-garde works that redefine art in today’s chaotic era

Noise Shrine

A cascade of soundscapes, aural experiments cuts, curls and rhythms. Some chaotic mediums to accompany a never ending commute through textured loops that grow in on themselves, ambient meltdowns, irregular time signatures and sonic trickery. The present now moments flashing gone before they even make sense it’s a permanent inquisition.The project noise shrine is best described as a commuter’s song. With roots in New York City Asia Ledesma (Noise Shrine) continues drawing inspiration from all the different facets of culture and genres that they grew up around reinterpreting them through an experimental lens. Utilizing sound as a sensory apparatus and constantly invoking the feeling of flipping through channels.

BONE STUDY

WEST SIDE EXPERMENTALIST. 

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AIRMW Arts Initiatives Presents: Hana Fujisaki

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August 21

Improvised Music Series: Wallace/Motl/Neuburg & Julián Pujols Quall/Alejandro Quiles/Cristal Sabbagh