Brooklyn Raga Massive’s Ragini Festival 2024 presents “Acoustic Fulcrums” - a diasporic night representative of Caribbean memory, language and iconic sound culture. Centered around the work of poet, memoirist and translator, Rajiv Mohabir and the arrangements of steel pan artist and bandleader, Josanne Francis, this curated night explores the axis of acoustic memory and palpable story telling, capturing the many rifts, continents and currents expressive of the Caribbean postcolonial experience.
Rajiv Mohabir’s work traverses and emanates out of a long dialogue with collective memory around the migrant experience, around fractured yet continuously sung oral history and the poetics,sonic transference and healing that writing can offer.
Josanne Francis is a maestra of the steelpan instrument, an innovation born out of colonial resistance, repurposing petroleum industry metal containers within the urban tenements of Trinidad’s capital area. Now steelpan has become a large orchestral, ensemble and improvisatory instrument, blooming with the sounds of African-descended percussive innovation.