Imna Arroyo
New London, CT
Imna Arroyo is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist whose work weaves the threads of heritage and ecological veneration into a contemporary artistic dialogue.
Message
Video montage of ritual honoring of the Orishas juxtaposed against images of environmental destruction contrasted with ecological vision of the first nations.
The film begins with a dance between the Orisha of the river Ochun Kole, and Iroko the Orisha who embodies the tree of life for the Yoruba people. A collage of images epitomizing man-made pollution and disruptive deforestation of the environment contrasting with the ancestral ecological vision of the Yoruba people through dance and songs of praise to the orishas. This is followed by images native life of the Katanzama indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia. The visuals for the video were acquired by the producers in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Iroko, Tree of Life / Iroko, Arbol de Vida
Created: 2017
Duration: 00:10:45
PRODUCER / DIRECTOR
Imna Arroyo, Tao Chen, Jaime Gómez
FILM / INTERVIEW:
Katanzama indigenous people in Colombia by Jaime Gomez and filmed by Julio Charris
EDITOR
Jaime Gomez, Tao Chen
MUSIC
Traditional Yoruba Songs curated by Amma D. McKen
SINGERS
Amma D. McKen
Denise Ola DeJean
Swahili Henry.
DANCE PERFORMERS
Alycia Bright-Holland
Sinque Tavares
VISUALS
Imna Arroyo, Tao Chen and Jaime Gómez
- Created: c. 2017
Puerto Rican artist devoted to exploring connections between the African continent and the Diaspora in an on-going endeavor to reclaim a lost and scattered heritage. Arroyo draws upon the imagery, symbolism and language of the Yoruba traditions of Africa to express a majestically complex and sophisticated worldview. In her multidisciplinary practice, she finds inspiration in the concept that art-making can be a ritualized form of healing.
"It is my intent to create Art that heals the deep-seated collective wounds of history, as well as to celebrate the vibrancy and relevance of a long denied ancestral legacy of self-expression", Imna Arroyo
Renowned scholar and Caribbean art and cultural critic, Yolanda Wood writes “… Imna Arroyo remains continually focused on those junctures where everything that is located outside the practices of hegemonic power, in the domains of the undervalued and subaltern, somehow meets. Settling within the space/time of these multiple references, she has inserted her own poetics based on life stories, autobiographical details, gender imprints, and the memories that inhabit them, all inscribed on the skin and in the reflections of the African subjects enslaved in times of modernity/coloniality and their descendants—which in fact we all are—and whose condition of existence the Barbadian writer George Lamming has identified as “a historical experience” in the Caribbean, yet one that certainly extends beyond the dominion of the plantations. From her migrant status, yet the bearer of a U.S. passport, Arroyo has succeeded in penetrating these silenced and hidden areas”.