Recomposition by Daniel Simmons
Recomposition is a multimedia, site-specific happening at Kinfolk Tech: Festival of Memory and Imagination. Created by Daniel Simmons, the installation connects musical composition with sculptural and textile works by artists, Connor McKnight and Sarah Nsikak. Traditional African drums sourced by Simmons are considered as aesthetic vessels and ancestral carriers of history and memory, acting as both artifacts and sonic portals. The work activates these spiritually rooted instruments, which are often left to sit in academic and institutional archives.
The title Recomposition is inspired by Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant. He states that forced displacement left Africans in the New World, African Americans, Antilleans, and Brazilians with a sense of deep loss. Their cultural memory was not simply a continued tradition. Instead, it was rebuilt from fragments, an imaginative attempt to restore what could not cross the Middle Passage. As an example, Glissant says jazz was not shaped by a continuous archive but by painful memory that returns through sound. Thus, Africans that came to America were forced to “Recompose”.
The installation features new original compositions as well as renditions from black American composers—coming primarily out of the jazz tradition while seeking to represent the larger black and afrodiasporic musical oeuvre, nodding to gospel, soul, samba, and afrobeat.
Engaging Glissant’s philosophy, Simmons incorporates the concept of creolization as continuous becoming into his work. Where hip hop can sometimes be distorted by the hands of industry to promote competition and capitalism, he explores whether rap, guided by acts of recomposition, can be a practice of encounter and relation rather than individualism and self aggrandizement. Simmons asserts that rap, like jazz, is a language made from rupture, deriving from the African oral tradition, and reemphasizes its framework in folklore, political discourse and reimagining.
By connecting literature, history, visual art, and music, the project demonstrates how gathering scattered fragments through art can actively preserve and make form from what was unmade.
Simmons will perform musically on vocals, percussion and kalimba, accompanied by Brandon Woody on trumpet, Warner Meadows on piano and vocals, Clerida Eltime on bass and vocals, Ezemdi Akalonu on percussion, and Canteenkilla on percussion and vocals. They are energized to be in conversation with the other incredible artists and thinkers who have participated in the Kinfolk programming over this past month.