Cosmovisión

Part musical event and part sonic ceremony performed with an instrument of their invention, Cosmovisión, the newest project from interdisciplinary artist collective Postcommodity, will premiere at SFMOMA with the event Cosmovisión Torneo de la Bahia on March 22 and 23, 2025.

Formed in 2007, Postcommodity has become known for their collaborative works, such as the monumental land art project Repellent Fence (2015), a two-mile-long installation of giant “scare-eye” balloons that intersects the U.S./Mexico border. Collective members Cristóbal Martinez (Genizaro) and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee) foreground the element of sound in Cosmovisión, an interactive digital art project supported by a 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT Award, as well as a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commission in partnership with Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. Martinez says audiences should expect an immersive, even rowdy experience: “It will be entertaining, but there’s more at stake: this is about coming together as a community of diverse peoples to learn from each other and how we perceive and relate with the land beneath our feet.”

In the performance at SFMOMA, two teams of Bay Area arts and culture workers will take turns performing with an instrument that transforms field recordings into experimental music. Line drawings representing their relationships with land function as graphic musical scores that will be projected onto the floor and the wall, dissolving or resolving depending on the ability of each team to sonically collaborate.

“Each participant will select sounds for the performance that consider their personal memories and stories in the Bay Area, and the sonic relationships they have here,” says Karen Cheung, curatorial associate of media arts, who has been working with the artists and the Public Engagement department to organize the event. Examples might include the sounds of a street corner, foghorn, MUNI bus, black-tailed deer, red-legged frog, or spotted owl.

The mood of the event is purposefully celebratory, but the work takes on weighty themes. According to Twist, “there are a lot of challenges around division that we’re trying to address. We are using land as a mediator of relationships, bringing people into communion and into a symbolic world that can temper divisive emotional responses.”

Learn more at Postcommodity: Cosmovisión Torneo de la Bahia