Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation; Santa Fe NM
Currently based in Albuquerque NM; San Francisco CA

A Song Often Played on the Radio
2018
Ink, graphite, earth, blood and wine on archival paper, digital video
24 min. (total duration)
Collection of the Artists

PART ONE
A score is displayed: unfurled near present-day Los Alamos and what the Spanish conquistadors thought to be the fabled “Cibola” or the Seven Cities of Gold.

PART TWO
A short film is played: sharing surrealistic, true and mythological stories of knowledge, wisdom and time from New Mexico told through local Hispano dialects and Indigenous languages.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation whose practice centers in sound. Chacon is one of the three members of the interdisciplinary arts collective Post-commodity, along with Cristobal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. As a solo artist and in collaborations, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Toronto, ON.

Cristóbal Martínez is an artist and publishing Liberal Arts and Sciences scholar. Martinez has dedicated his career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art. He positions metaphors to mediate complications within sites of dromological, spatial, social, cultural, political, ecological and economic anxiety. Within these locations, Martinez aestheticizes complexity to generatively engage publics in recovering/connecting knowledge. He has been a member of the interdisciplinary artist collective Post-commodity since 2010, and founded the artist-hacker performance ensemble Radio Healer in 2003. In 2015 Martinez completed his PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics at Arizona State University, and is currently the Chair of Art and Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute.