Ballroom Marfa presents Kite Symphony, a multidisciplinary exhibition by Roberto Carlos Lange and Kristi Sword. The project features a newly commissioned film, outdoor composition and installation, a series of drawings, sculpture, animation, and a special Earth Day performance. Sound is the throughline between these diverse elements of this long-term project. Lange is a musician (widely known as Helado Negro) and Sword is a visual artist, and Kite Symphony is an extension of their collaborative practice where they create work at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art.

Invited by Ballroom in March 2020 for a production trip for Kite Symphony, then a short film with a live score, Lange and Sword found themselves in West Texas at the onset of a global pandemic and mandates to socially isolate. The artists elected to remain in Marfa and with Ballroom’s support, extended their trip into a six-month residency. Their experience was the catalyst for Ballroom Sessions—The Farther Place, a residency program developed to support cross-disciplinary artists and musicians. As their time in Marfa extended Kite Symphony expanded into a full-scale exhibition, including new installation works, a community sound piece, performance, and four new experimental compositions released through Ballroom’s Bandcamp. Pitchfork called this album a “free-flowing collage that doubles as a snapshot of the project’s sprawl” and named it one of the top 20 ambient albums of 2020. The album features contributions from noted local musicians Jeanann Dara and Rob Mazurek, led by Sword’s meditative and meticulous visual scores.

Guided by the wind and inspired by their day-to-day experiences with the local landscape, Lange and Sword centered a practice of listening to produce new work. Their listening took many forms: they utilized meditative practices to tune their bodies into the sonic environment; they employed field recording to capture and amplify ephemeral or barely audible sounds like wings of insects and the wind itself; and they launched an open call to the community to hear the sounds of the town through the ears of locals. Lange recounts, “When you have your headphones on and a microphone pointing out to the expanses surrounding Marfa you’re surprised with the density of the air. It’s like a big blanket wraps your head and you’re invited into another world.” 

The exhibition at Ballroom features an impressionistic film, which explores the imperceptible forces that shape the West Texas landscape. The video documents the artists’ observations and experiments with wind and light interacting with kites, hand-made mylar instruments, found objects, and native plant materials. Lange and Sword turn their gaze upwards in Star Scores, a piece of visual music that reflects on the region’s dark skies through hand-made animations of galaxies orbiting, multiplying, and expanding through an imaginary celestial space. Adjacent are Sword’s ink drawings of rhythmic and repetitive brush marks, revealing a continuous evolution of a landscape in constant motion. Ballroom’s courtyard will be transformed into a listening space where Lange presents a new sonic installation composed of the sounds collected from the community. Taken together, all of these newly commissioned works heighten the audience’s sense of space by attuning us to expansive new sonic geographies, helping us to listen in diverse ways, and reminding us of our presence in a living world.

On Earth Day, April 22, 2022, Ballroom will host a day of performances with Roberto Carlos Lange and several of his musical collaborators. The show will feature live renditions of Star Scores, a performance of Kite Symphony, Four Variations with a live ensemble, and performances by several friends of the artists, with the full lineup to be announced in early 2022.

Kite Symphony is organized by Sarah Melendez, Ballroom Marfa music curator.

For the exhibition, The Blessings of the Mystery, artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas create a new film and series of installations rooted in West Texas. The project crystallizes the artists’ research into the connections and tensions between the cultural, scientific, industrial, and socio-political forces across locations like the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, the Amistad Dam on the Rio Grande, and the Permian Basin oil fields. 

The presentation centers around The Teachings of the Hands, a single-channel film that depicts the region’s complex histories of colonization, migration, and ecological precarity from the perspective of Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. The video-installation combines observational and experimental documentary with oral histories, reenactments, and archival footage. The film’s narrative grows out of the land where both Indigenous and settler knowledge have been historically produced. Weaving together scenes from the present day to 4,000 years in the past, The Teachings of the Hands highlights the environmental memories and cosmologies of these interconnected places across Texas.

The artists’ pull from different materials and sources to expand on the concepts in the film––they create immersive installations of surveying flags and tools, rendered several series of drawings and collages, and included a collection of original watercolors from the 1930s by artists and amateur archaeologists Forrest and Lula Kirkland that depict the ancient rock art of the Lower Pecos. On loan from the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, these rarely seen plein air paintings document the original forms and vibrant colors of murals that were still visible in the 30s, before flooding, erosion, and human interaction damaged or destroyed them.

The Blessings of the Mystery emerges from Caycedo and de Rozas’s multidisciplinary practices, which are centered around environmental justice, encounters between history and memory, and Indigenous rights and cosmologies. For this exhibition and its iterations across Texas, Caycedo and de Rozas investigate the transformation of Somi Se’k* by way of industry, infrastructure, and private property.

*Somi Se’k means the Land of the Sun and is the way the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe refers to the land known as Texas.

The Blessings of the Mystery is organized by Laura Copelin, former Director & Curator.

The exhibition traveled to the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at The University of Texas at Austin in September 2021 and to the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso in January 2022. The VAC presentation was organized by MacKenzie Stevens, Director, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts presentation was organized by Kerry Doyle, Director.

Solange Pessoa Longilonge was the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of noted Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. The show included new commissioned works that responded to the cultural and natural landscape in West Texas, alongside important existing pieces made in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the artist lives and works.

Pessoa’s expressive work draws inspiration from many sources: nature, the Baroque, dreams and the unconscious, Tropicalia, prehistoric cave paintings and carved tools, Land Art, traditional craft, ancestry, Surrealism, and poetry. Five distinct bodies of work converged for the exhibition—displaying touch-points in the artist’s career and creating a connective tissue of imagery, ideas, and relationships between two distant places in North and South America.

For Longilonge, Pessoa recreated a seminal installation originally staged in Brazil in 1994––an immersive sculpture composed of tiers of coffee bags suspended from the ceiling that were filled with fruit, flowers, seeds, bones, earth, and poems. Visitors were invited to rifle through the abundant materials, spilling, adding and co-creating the sculpture, sensing firsthand the living land of Minas and Marfa—the colors, textures, decay and richness.

Pessoa also debuted a new suite of paintings inspired by research trips to Marfa, where she met local botanists and archeologists, and saw Donald Judd’s works in person for the first time. She created new ceramic pieces and installed her iconic soapstone carvings in Ballroom’s outdoor courtyard, where they absorbed the sun, rain and snow. The clay and stone, sourced in Brazil, she shaped to recall varied organic forms: vaginal voids, nipples, phalli, skulls, spirals, ancient fossils. Bronze and feather wall sculptures adorned the hall, invoking the animal body–its death, life and decoration.

Pessoa’s practice is deeply rooted in land, human and natural history. In this focused exhibition she gathered together materials and iconography from distant but similar environments, creating a conversation between shared forms and interwoven cosmogonies.

This exhibition was organized by Ballroom Marfa Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

Ballroom Marfa invites you to join us for a free premiere of MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange on Sunday, September 4 at the Marfa Visitor Center. 

MXTX is a live performance, album and open-source audio sample library crossing physical and social boundaries through collaborative exchange. The project involves more than 40 DJ-producers and composers from both sides of the Rio Grande. A collective of the contributing musicians will travel to Marfa to take the stage for the West Texas Premiere of the project as part of the 35th annual Marfa Lights Festival.

The multifaceted and dynamic project is a collaboration of numerous Texas and Mexico-based artists including:

• Golden Hornet, an Austin-based non-profit led by Graham Reynolds
• Orión García, founder of the Latinx DJ/producer/artist collective, Peligrosa
• Coka Treviño, art entrepreneur from Monterrey, Mexico and founder of The Projecto
• Felipe Pérez Santiago, highly-acclaimed Mexico City composer, sound artist and current artist in residence at California’s SETI Institute
• Ramón Amezcua “Bostich” of the groundbreaking Nortec Collective, based in Tijuana
• Rubén Albarrán, renowned vocalist and activist from Mexico City, lead singer of the legendary Cafe Tacvba
• Gabriela Ortiz, Latin Grammy nominated composer and recipient of Mexico’s National Prize for Arts & Literature

MXTX began with the creation of a sample library commissioned from twenty composers and twenty DJ-producers based in Mexico and Texas. These forty artists created a palette of sound designed to represent each of their perspectives. The DJ-producers provided beats, drops, and more, while the composers created melodic, rhythmic, and chordal fragments to be recorded as segments and loops. All of these sounds formed the initial foundation of the MXTX library. A core group of six composers and six DJ-producers, commissioned with balanced geographical representation, used this library to create twelve songs. Created for a mixed chamber ensemble and a DJ, the twelve works will be presented live, with premieres in Marfa, Mexico City, and Austin.

The MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange album was released through Six Degrees Records in 2022 and consists of thirteen songs that demonstrate the immense beauty and power of music to overcome divides. Presented as part of the Marfa Lights Festival, the show at the Marfa Visitor Center will be the second live performance of MXTX. Attendance is free and open to the public. 

Marfa Myths was an annual music festival and multidisciplinary cultural program founded in 2014 by nonprofit contemporary arts foundation Ballroom Marfa and Brooklyn-based music label Mexican Summer. In 2015, The festival expanded from one night to three days and initiated a multi-disciplinary program that featured a sound installation, film screening, and recording residency. With Marfa Myths, the two organizations bring together a diversity of emerging and established artists and musicians to work creatively and collaboratively across music, film, and visual arts contexts. The festival is inherently embedded in the landscape of Far West Texas, and engages with Marfa’s cultural history and present-day community.

MEN performed at the opening reception for Tierra. Sangre. Oro. MEN is a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective led by Le Tigre’s JD Samson and Michael O’Neill. MEN believe in the radical potential of dance music and its power to demand liberties through invention and play. 

This was the group’s first performance in several years and included new and iconic music and performance as well as new tracks from each artist’s solo projects. 

Ballroom nominated Serpent Rain by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman for the 2017 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). 

Serpent Rain screened at Marfa’s Crowley Theater along with 12 videos from around the world. The international program was looped into a day of drop-in screenings. This was followed by the feature presentation of Serpent Rain, with a conversation with Ferreira da Silva and Neuman.

The AFI 2017 weekend continued with The Water Body, a symposium organized by Ferreira da Silva and Neuman as an expansion of Serpent Rain and a connector to their next project, Deep Implicancy. The Water Body brought together different perspectives, disciplines, and backgrounds to engage in a conversation about water, locally and globally. Participants included Timothy Morton, author of Hyperobjects and co-curator of the Spring 2018 Ballroom exhibition of the same name; Rafa Esparza, the artist behind Ballroom’s Tierra. Sangre. Oro. exhibition; Yolanda Blue Horse, co-founder of the Society of Native Nations; ecological systems designer, consultant, teacher, and permacultural grower Nance Klehm; and Coyne Gibson of the Big Bend Conservation Alliance. The symposium took place in Marfa at The Lumberyard’s Adobe Room.

Ballroom presented Steve Reich’s 1967 composition Violin Phase, performed throughout the gallery by Jeanann Dara and Ben Russell during the opening reception of Ballroom Marfa’s 2019 fall exhibition, Longilonge, with Solange Pessoa. Violin Phase is a masterpiece of minimalist music, demonstrating Reich’s iconic phasing technique. The music itself is created from interactions between temporal variations of an original melody and the violins themselves. 

Following the opening reception of Ballroom’s fall exhibition, Longilonge, with Solange Pessoa on November 15, UJI will be performing a DJ set with live percussion at Lost Horse Saloon.

The Marfa Triptych is three portraits of West Texas as envisioned by Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds.

The multimedia, genre-hopping trilogy of performances is inspired by Reynolds’ interest in the intermingled populations of the Texas-Mexico border regions, from ejido to ranch to the visual arts community. The three performances will take place annually, starting in late 2013.