At Rewire 2024, Nest presents Atelier Impopulaire and Blacks’ Myths’ world premiere of 12 Gates, a new act of the opera in three parts titled Before We Love. Atelier Impopulaire is the collaboration of artist and cultural activist Pia Bolognesi and filmmaker and dramatist Giulio Bursi. Since 2012 they have worked together on projects involving moving-image, writing, installation, and sculpture. Together they research visual languages by deconstructing and reinterpreting how representations function in contemporary culture.

For Rewire, they collaborate with the New York duo Blacks' Myths. Blacks' Myths, consisting of Luke Stewart and Trae Crudup, creates walls of sound with a combination of bass guitar and drums, incorporating complex rhythms and raw melodies.

Commissioned especially for Rewire 2024 by Rewire and Nest, Before We Love: 12 Gates is a large-scale multi-screen installation that integrates rare archival material with new footage inspired by the story and the legacy of UMBRA Poets Workshop (1961–1963). It is part of a trilogy of works by Atelier Impopulaire that delves into the birth of underground artistic movements and civil rights activism in the Italian, African-American, and Latino communities of 1960s New York.

Displayed in Nest's new temporary space in Laak, the installation will transform twice daily into a polyphonic, layered sound environment by Blacks' Myths. Their sound recalls the multitude and complexity of the political dynamics that shaped UMBRA, laying the foundation for the Black Arts Movement, altering the course of American poetry, and promted in the birth of free jazz.

From April 2024 onwards, Nest will temporarily move to a new space located at the Verheeskade in Laak, The Hague. The weekend of Rewire marks the first event in this new space, kicking off a program around deep listening - a method for listening with radical attention and focus. Read more about this temporal move here.

You can attend the performance for free, and can also visit Nest in Laak and see the installation outside of the performance times.

About Umbra Poets Workshop

Central to 'Before We Love' is the archive and legacy of the New York underground poetry collective Umbra Poets Workshop. This literary group was active in the 1960s, following the Afro-American civil rights movement in America. They were influenced by various literary movements, including black nationalist consciousness, the Beat Generation, and the experimental poetry of the time. They radically distinguished themselves from the prevailing white literary world. The members of the Umbra Poetry Collective, including Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, and others, aimed to amplify the voices of minority groups in American literature. They organized lectures, poetry performances, and published a magazine called 'Umbra Magazine,' in which their own poems and those of other emerging poets were published