Hosted by Indigo Arts Alliance and Atlantic Black Box
Thursday, October 28th at 5:00pm EST
Register here
ReMAPping New England is a historical recovery project aimed at inscribing these effaced narratives both in the built environment and on a dynamic digital landscape in an effort to re-member our communities in all their diversity and radically shift public consciousness toward truth.
The third installment in this ongoing series of conversations will take place Thursday, Oct. 28th 5pm EST via Zoom. Indigo Arts Alliance’s 2021 Fall artist-in-residence Antonio Rocha will be in conversation with Dr. Rachel Harding, Associate Professor of Indigenous Spiritual Traditions in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver and Dr. Kate McMahon, Museum Specialist, Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Together, these brilliant minds will discuss the Afro-Atlantic histories and events inspiring Rocha’s current work in progress. Topics will include the Malaga ship and the destruction of Black communities at the turn of the century, Environmental Justice, African Diasporic Spirituality and more.
Antonio Rocha began his career in the performing arts in 1985. A native of Brazil, he received a Partners of the Americas grant to come to the USA to perform and deepen his mime skills with Mime Master Tony Montanaro in 1988. Since then he has earned a Summa Cum Laude Theater BA from USM (University of Southern Maine) and studied with Master Marcel Marceau. Mr. Rocha’s unique fusion of mime and spoken word has been performed from Singapore to South Africa and many places in between including 16 countries on 6 continents.
Dr. Rachel Hardingis a poet and historian. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Harding teaches in the Ethnic Studies department of the University of Colorado Denver and writes about religion, creativity and social justice organizing in the experience of people of African descent in the Americas. She is author of two books: A Refuge in Thunder, a history of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé; and Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism and Mothering, co-written with her late mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, on the role of compassion and mysticism in African American activism.
Dr. Kate McMahon has a Ph.D. in History from Howard University. Her dissertation, The Transnational Dimensions of Africans and African Americans in Northern New England, 1776–1865, explores the complexities of the shipbuilding economies of northern New England, their connections to the slave trade, and how Africans and African Americans resisted slavery and racism. She has also been involved in the Malaga Island archaeology project, a mixed-race fishing community that was evicted by the state of Maine in 1912. More recently, her research has focused on the connections between northern New England and the illegal slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, ca. 1830-1850.
Indigo Arts Alliance connects Black and Brown artists from around the world with Maine’s artists of African descent through a multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program that embodies a Black-led approach to creativity, community-building, and mentoring.
Atlantic Black Box is a public history project that supports individuals and institutions in researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the Atlantic world slave economy.
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council.
