Postcommodity: Cosmovisión Torneo de la Bahia took place on March 22 and March 23, 2025, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibition wall text written by Karen Cheung:
Formed in 2007, artist collective Postcommodity is known for its socially engaged artworks that promote a constructive discourse connecting Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere. Members Cristóbal Martinez (Genizaro) and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee) foreground the element of sound in their latest project, Cosmovisión, to explore our relationships with the land we came from and occupy today.

Postcommodity invited seven Bay Area-based arts and cultural workers to participate in the premiere of Cosmovisión Torneo de la Bahia, a musical event and sonic ceremony currently unfolding in this space. These workers were selected because they serve the Bay Area by helping to organize community. Considering the greater acoustic ecology at work in both built and natural environments, each participant sonically mapped the local landscape with field recordings. Their sounds embody a spectrum of frequencies that represent places with personal significance, whether connected to a memory from the past or even a proposition for the future. Stories emerging through this collaboration are sonified and visualized as graphic musical scores projected on the walls and floor.

Two teams of participants take turns performing with an instrument of Postcommodity's invention to transform their recordings into experimental music and use the device's controls to send real-time feedback to one another. Line drawings that form the scores come into view when participants collaboratively improvise and harmonize sounds. The projected images will dissipate into smoke with discordance but return to focus with sonority. Using land as a mediator of relationships in this work, the collective encourages knowledge sharing, the practice of intentional listening, and the creation of generative conversations that can lead to syncretized worldviews.

Performers: JD Beltran, Rob Corder, Derek Gedalecia, Kim Shuck Jorge Eduardo Sibaja, Rosario Sotelo, Raquel Vigil

This presentation of Cosmovisión Torneo de la Bahia is organized by SFMOMA Media Arts and Public Engagement Department staff members Karen Cheung, Chice Kwiatiowski, and Kathlen Maguire and in partnership with Vanessa Chang of Leonardo/ISAST.

Support for Cosmovision is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission in partnership with Leonardo/ISAST, Arizona State University, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Ford Foundation, US Latin Art Forum, the MAP Fund, and the Otis College of Art and Design.

Presenting support for the performance of Cosmovisión Toreo de la Baria is provided by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Cosmovisión: A Performance Premiere from Artist Collective Postcommodity by Claire Bradley in SFMOMA Online