David Zink Yi presents the two-channel video installation “Horror Vacui” (2009) in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. building. The work functions as an extended image without beginning or end. The film focuses on De Adentro y Afuera, a Latin band founded by Zink Yi and Cuban musicians, and combines footage of their rehearsals with images of ceremonial rituals rooted in Afro-Cuban culture. Emphasis is placed on the role of the rituals in the production of the music and vice versa. The ceremonies documented in the film, known as Cajón, Tambor Batá and Wiro, relate to the African diaspora religions Palo Congo and Santería and to the religion of the Yoruba people – whose spirituality and culture originates in Nigeria, Benin and the Congo Basin and is at the root of different religious traditions in the Americas today due to the African diaspora. In Zink Yi’s work, band rehearsals and music filled with religious rituals are equally situated as spaces in which collective and individual identities can develop outside of oppressive power structures, as alternatives to relationships built on extraction and inferiority.

In between the vast network of collaboration and dependence that unites the protagonists of both social universes, Horror Vacui allows the viewer to become a channel, unifying fragments and intervals, immersing us in the colorful and seductive universe of Afro-Cuban music, while paying homage to the infinite performative power of all participants.