INTERVIEW & COMMENTARY // MYSTIC MIX
From the salty seas of the Caribbean to Philadelphia, Elio Villafranca’s music emerges from the depths of our common humanity
words and photos by Ildi Tillmann
EXCERPT //
With the goal of decolonizing our knowledge we were taught to recognize the nature of empire, metropolitan cultural impositions, and the resulting bias in versions of history taught. We learned about the ways power and political interests distorted narration of the past in the Americas, and we have become aware of blind spots in what it is that the public knows. Armed with all that knowledge, one would be justified in thinking that we, as the community of enlightened thinkers arm-in-arm with grassroots activists, have forged ahead on the road that will lead us from the past to a better present.
But have we, really? Or is there something we have lost sight of along the way to inclusivity? Such as, perhaps, a meaningful and inclusive conversation about the powers to be of our present? Or an analysis of how a dynamic process for progress and a better society has, yet again, as it has so many times in history, instead become a rigid, bureaucratically managed system—a power structure in and of itself? Have we created entitities that have ceased to engage with ideas and with works of art that do not fit a narrow view of the world?
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