TabomBass

Winter Music Conference at Faena Forum
3300 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach

8:30 PM – 11:00 PM
Free and open to the public
RSVP

Faena Art presents TabomBass by artist Vivian Caccuri, a sound installation and performance. TabomBass is the setting for an ‘anti-concert’– not a standard musical presentation but a contemporary ritual. Existing somewhere between altarpiece and stage set, Caccuri presents us with a gathering place for the different sounds and traditions that make up the Miami experience and identity.

The work is a sound system composed of stacked speakers, similar to those used at street parties in cultures around the world –from Brazil to Jamaica to Little Havana. The utilitarian speakers are taken to an architectural and monumental extreme, becoming a wall of sound, stage backdrop and installation. Lit candles are placed in front of the speakers much like an altar. The flames move with the displaced air and dance to the rhythm of the deep sounds –basslines composed by artists from the city of Accra, Ghana who collaborated with Caccuri during her research there. Accra received groups of African-Brazilians who fled Brazil after the Malê Revolt, a slave rebellion that took place in Salvador in 1835.

To this day, their descendants are known as ‘Tabom’ – because, not knowing the local languages, they answered all questions with ‘tá bom’ [roughly translated as ‘okay’]. Taking this historical background as a point of departure, Caccuri seeks to expand and reconsider the lines of connection, particularly through sound and music, along the Africa-America trajectory.

Speaking about her work Vivian said “This is part of a larger series of works that are altars to the bass. The bass moves us, vibrates in our bodies, in our organs. I consider the bass an entity inside of the music because it connects people—it is on a sound spectrum that makes people move. When you see the candles pulsating to the bass—to the low frequencies—it is a metaphor for what happens inside of us. Our bodies are 90% liquids.. and these liquids react to the sound in the same way that fire does”.