Astro Black

In their video installations and performance lectures Soda_Jerk work with audiovisual samples to create new narratives that revise and interrogate historical events and cultural trajectories. Their practice is fundamentally concerned with the production of counter-mythologies of the past that open new possibilities for interpreting the present. This conceptual strategy also informs their sample-based methodology, where the potential to reassemble the history of recordings is approached as a concrete means of troubling the record of history.Soda_Jerk’s exhibition at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien will present the first four episodes of Astro Black, an ongoing video cycle initiated in 2007. This work draws on the conceptual framework of Afrofuturism, a field of cultural theory that approaches the science fiction tropes of Black Atlantic culture as a form of social politics. At the core of Astro Black is a dramatic reworking of the 1974 film Space is the Place in which cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra visits Earth in his sonic-powered U.F.O. to battle the oppressive social regime of 1970’s America. Exhibited for the first time in Europe as a 4-channel video installation, Astro Black will include two new episodes produced in Berlin. These works trace the lasting impact Kraftwerk have had on Afrofuturist sonic cultures – pointing towards a conception of cultural production that exceeds the limiting framework of nationalism. Soda_Jerk is a collaboration between sisters Dan and Dominique Angeloro.