For our second and final New Orleans event in our longform Living Equipment series, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Triple Canopy invite you to attend ‘Infinite Rehearsal’, featuring Ryan C. Clarke in conversation and collaboration with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Carter Mathes, Shannon Mathes, and Gabrielle Octavia Rucker.
Rooted in text from Guyanese poet, writer, and surveyor Wilson Harris, this event reads diaspora and Black expression in/as a cycle of geological phenomena. In the History of the Earth, the petrification is the process by which organic matter, when exposed to minerals over a long time, turns to stony substance. It is also a state of extreme fear, resulting in paralysis. Black culture and its crisis of narration will be examined and discussed through the examination of trace fossils and the search for transmutation and the unending cycles of creation, collapse, and substitution at work within them.
Thursday, September 25, 2025
at The Dew Drop Inn
2836 Lasalle Street,
New Orleans, Louisiana,
at 6:15pm CT (doors open at 5:45pm CT)
This program is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at our Eventbrite link to register and learn more.
Living Equipment, led by Ryan C. Clarke, is a sequence of conversations, listening sessions, and performances devoted to minor histories and radical resonances of Black Electronic music, presented by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Triple Canopy in New York.
Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of the Mississippi, and an editor and curator at Dweller Electronics. His work has been published and presented by e-flux journal, Rhizome, Burnaway, Terraforms, Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, and MoMA PS1. With Dweller, Clarke produces festivals and publications that center the perspectives of Black electronic musicians.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critic’s Circle finalist, and was cited by Bookforum as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. She organizes collaborative public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute in New York.
Carter Mathes is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Advanced Institute of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where he is a specialist in African American literature, 20th-Century literature, and African Diasporic Studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 70s. Currently, he is at work on a second book, Ecologies of Funk, that examines formations of black radical thought in literature and music as they move between Jamaica and New Orleans.
Shannon Lee Mathes is a photographer from Virginia and Tennessee, currently residing in East Orange, New Jersey. She has a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a certificate in documentary studies from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her photographs engage the liminality of remembering through images that animate the relationships between spatial ecologies and sacred practices. She is currently working on multiple projects in New Orleans, Virginia, and New Jersey.
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer and editor from the Great Lakes and is currently living on the Gulf Coast. She is the sole operator and practitioner of The Seminary of Ecstatic Poetics. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and a 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction, is currently available via The Song Cave.
In New Orleans, Living Equipment is sponsored by The Henry Luce Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and The Terra Foundation for American Art. In New York, events were sponsored by a Humanities New York Action Grant and Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color, co-founded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation.