AfroDixieRemixes Listening Session

6:00 PM, Tuesday 31 May 31 2022 (In-person event)

Sponsored by Red Salmon Arts

This final event will be hosted by Red Salmon Arts/Resistencia Books featuring a listening session of the double LP project AfroDixieRemixes, a sound project that confronts the song Dixie – the anthem of the Confederacy by remixing, remapping and cross-appropriation with a collection of 14 tracks of Dixie in the many genres of black music: spiritual, blues, gospel, jazz, funk, calypso, samba, soul, rhythm & blues, house, and hip-hop. The Austin community will be invited to come and listen and discuss the tracks in preparation for a later performative listening session.

Recoloration Proclamation, is a system of projects that features recolored Confederate flags; a hanging installation in Gettysburg; a 13 southern states Confederate flag funeral; videos; site-specific performances; a play; a collection of experimental films; the music project, “AfroDixieRemixes,” the annual “Burn and Bury Confederate Flag Memorial”; and the outside performance and Kennedy Museum exhibition of “The Proper Way to Hang to a Confederate Flag” at Ohio University, the installation of the world’s largest Afro Confederate Battle Flag on the steps of theSouth Carolina capitol building. Over the years, this work has incorporated more than 150 collaborators including poets, musicians, and artists throughout the country.

For more on the artist’s thoughts leading to this project, see his Huffington Post piece, Burn and Bury Memorial: Birth of a Ritual, and his 2017 Detroit Free Press Op-Ed piece: Why I am Burning and Burying The Confederate Flag in Detroit.  

FMI: https://www.resistenciabooks.com/artist-john-sims-comes-to-austin-with-afrodixia-journey-to-justice-featuring

 “I hope that this work may provide a path to confront the deep insidious nature of Confederate iconography, white-supremacy trauma and the legacy of American slavery through the creative process and agency of re-imagination, re-souling  and righteous confiscation while providing an inspiring  space for reflection, reckoning, and recovery toward a better, understanding of Southern heritage and a more just America. With that in mind, I am excited to come to Austin and share this work with a creative and political community ready to fight against the Confederate state of mind and embrace the challenging path of recovery, healing and social justice.” – John Sims, 2022

Red Salmon Arts is a 501(c)3 grassroots cultural arts organization, with a thirty-year history of working with the indigenous neighborhoods of Austin. RSA is dedicated to the development of emerging writers and the promotion of Chicanx/@/Latinx/@/Native American literature, providing outlets and mechanisms for cultural exchange, and sharing in the retrieval of a people’s cultural heritage with a commitment to social justice.

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.