CAESURA: A Performance by Raven Chacon & Guillermo Galindo

Saturday, February 1, 2025 3pm – 4pm

Caesura is a collaborative and graphic music score that examines the sonic history of the railway and to be performed live by Raven Chacon, Guillermo Galindo, and guest percussionist Alan Zimmerman, utilizing railway fragments and ephemera. Designed to be site-responsive, this performance will take place at Albuquerque Rail Yards, driving home the artists’ conceptual vision as the piece was composed based on historically significant train routes Chacon and Galindo identified and researched.

“The project acknowledges the many communities that were shaped, transported, and left behind by the train tracks,” state Galindo and Chacon. "The title refers to the musical term for a pause, and is also referred to as ‘railroad tracks.’ Our score is a shape-shifting composition utilizing alleged ‘hobo code’ symbols as notations for performers’ movements between instruments, becoming a language of nomadic sound. ... The performance invokes the social and economic divisions between communities created by the invention of modern transportation and the commercial expansion it facilitated." 

About the Performers

Mexican artist Guillermo Galindo is an experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist, and visual media artist whose work redefines the conventional limits between music, music composition, interdisciplinary practices, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality, and social awareness. Galindo’s work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), NHK World (Japan), Vice (London), HFFDK (Germany), RTS (Switzerland), NPR and City Arts and Lectures (U.S.). In 2024 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and presently holds a senior adjunct teaching position at the California College of Arts in San Francisco. He has also been a Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University (2018) and has been a resident artist at Vanderbilt University and at the Rollins Cornell Arts Museum where he has been a Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar. His work includes solo instrumental works, operas, sonic sculptures, visual arts, computer interaction works, electro-acoustic music, film, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installations, and live improvisation. His graphic scores and three-dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic sonic objects have been shown at museums and art biennials in America, Europe, and Asia, and are in the permanent collections of major museums such as LACMA in Los Angeles and The National Gallery in Washington DC.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, he has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Kennedy Center, among many others. As a member of Postcommodity, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial and documenta 14, among others. As a long time recording artist, Chacon has appeared on over 80 releases on national and international labels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, a United States Artists fellowship, and The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts. His solo artworks are in the collections of major museums and private collections.

Caesura is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by 516 ARTS, with Ogden Contemporary Arts, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.