Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe

Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe is a sound and moving-image installation at Recess, presented as part of the Session program. The artist YATTA, a Sierra Leonean-American composer and great-niece of the pioneering Sierra Leonean palm wine musician S.E. Rogie, transforms the gallery into an evolving pre-production environment for the project, which is named after Rogie's song "Koneh Pelawoe," meaning "Please Open Your Heart." The installation pairs a collegiate ethnomusicology building with a Southern and West African veranda, bringing together Rogie's songs, recorded conversations, archival materials, and YATTA's compositions of vocals, kora, and field recordings. Through Rogie's musical legacy, YATTA explores the entanglements of Blackness, land, leisure, and extraction, asking what healing possibilities the sounds of West Africa may hold when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is set down.