In conjunction with our exhibition PICO: Un parlante de África en América, we’re sharing a weekly series of online commissions by a global group of visual and sonic practitioners. This series maps Afro-Diasporic visual and sonic practices as both an outcome and facilitator of cultures of resistance.

For this week’s contribution to the digital programme we’re pleased to share Techna Respectademica, a newly commissioned mixtape by BŪJIN.

Techna Respectademica is a mixtape album looking at the dialectics of riddim, techno and the radical divergence and historical lineage of reggaeton. It looks at the relentlessly shifting face and defiance of South African sgubhu and yaadt music as a deeper listen-in on what complexly racialised notations of vocalities would sound like if the mixtape, the club, the yaadt (the backyard, parking lot, open gathering space), the street, the taxi and the sound system were metronomous interlocutors for Black vocality and autonomy. What does vocality look like for persons, bodies, accents, genders, class-categories who are denied…vs. those who are readily granted access, and what would this sound like in a mixtape?

BŪJIN (Dani Kyengo O’Neill) is a Kenyan- South African composer, director, noisemaker, producer, instrumentalist and DJ. Their current research looks deeper into black sonic auralities, dialogues of riddim histories in the diaspora, experimental sound production, filmmaking and somatics as liberatory practices informed by sound, assembly, aural imagery, choreography and Afrikan queer lived realities. Their composition practice challenges perspectives of formal language and its various limitations, where white-cube-capitalist ways of engaging art have failed us.