Taller Portobelo Norte
Taller Portobelo Norte is pleased to invite visual and literary artists to apply for it’s 2009 Black Christ Festival Artist Retreat taking place October 18th to October 25th in the bayside village of Portobelo, Panama. The Feast day of the Cristo Negro of Portobelo, also known as the Black Christ Festival, is the perfect setting for artists, especially photographers, to work out creative ideas and gain artistic inspiration. As many as 60,000 devotees make the yearly pilgrimage to Portobelo during the festival, which is more secular than sacred. The crowds of thousands eat, drink, dance, yell, laugh, and blast music until the wee hours of the morning. The pilgrims descend on the small village carrying their homemade altars high above their heads, dragging their heavy, life-sized crosses behind them or crawling into town, their partners pouring hot wax on their bare backs. Artists will have the opportunity to commune with one another, work on small projects and participate in the annual religious festival that draws tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.
The Black Christ Festival Artist Retreat is ideal for artists interested in religion, Latin America and the African Diaspora. Photographers will be attracted to the age-old rituals and traditions of the predominately black town; it’s ancient Spanish forts, slave cemetery, and retained slave and cimarron (called Congo) culture. Artists won’t fail to be stimulated by the abundance of stunning visual imagery, overwhelming emotion and electrifying energy of the festival. Taller Portobelo Norte is accepting applications for the international workshop online through it’s website www.tallerportobelonorte.com.
Taller Portobelo Norte (Portobelo Workshop North in Spanish) is a collective of emerging and established artists and artist/scholars that seeks to encourage critical dialogues around the art and culture(s) of the African Diaspora, create a cross-cultural, intergenerational, multidisciplinary exchange of ideas and inspirations among artists, and create a supportive space for experimental and non-traditional artists, writers, and scholars to experience communal intellectual stimulation as well as quiet contemplation.
For additional information please contact Ms. Oronike Odeleye at 678-949-9860 or visit www.tallerportobelonorte.com/
