The Visitation

An urban odyssey in search of the collective memory of a deer’s sojourn in Harlem’s Jackie Robinson Park. A soundscape that offers up new ways of looking at and listening to our environment by placing us within a timeline that extends beyond our lived experience. A series of songs that meditate on the presence of the mythic in the everyday. This site-specific sound walk plumbs the uneasy relationship we tread between the built environment and the natural world.

music, sound & narration: Christina Campanella
text: Stephanie Fleischmann

Lenape historical consultant: Oleana Whispering Dove

with
Black-Eyed Susan, Callie Holley, Mia Pixley, Carl Hancock Rux, John-Andrew Morrison, Abraham Gomez-Delgado, Jude Shiner, Mark Spencer, Sammy Baker & Ryan Packard

Initiated in collaboration with Mallory Catlett

Commissioned by Here Arts Center. With Support from Café Royal Cultural Foundation.

photo: Elizabeth Felicella

available via URHERE.

To experience the sound walk at Jackie Robinson Park, download and print out the map below or via URHERE before you go. (Don’t forget your phone and headphones.) Take the A train to 145th. Enter the park at 145th & either Bradhurst or Edgecombe. Press play on the link provided by URHERE & go!

Or the walk can be experienced remotely, at home.

Download/print map

“The place itself is an integral collaborator in the work you’re making. It’s not just what you’re seeing as you go on the walk but how it feels to be moving through that particular space.”

—The Medium

“A unique, immersive meditation.”

—Reviews Hub

“An episodic fantasia in which the very fabric of time is haunted by this singular creature’s spectral “visitation”…. The experience overall demands that listeners bask in their immediate surroundings, as well as thoughtfully contemplate the shrouded crevices of our collective history and the current bruised state of the natural world.”

—Viewpoints