anti-lecture
COSMOS
Move into THE surreal
An Anti-Lecture displaces the position of the "lecturer" as the "owner" of knowledge and works to liberate the strictures of erudition. It privileges a knowledge that could be called intuitive rather than 'rational.' Through a multi-layered narrative, I use different mediums, including soundscape, visual loops, and both academic and poetic text, to tell stories that, in many ways, mirror griot tradition. It is not only a way of imparting stories that often get lost within hegemonic discourses but also imparts "ideas" open to more fluid interpretations. The engagement of different perspectives, a progressive, dialectical approach to discourses brings us closer to a notion of Knowledge as free and flowing.
jamika ‘s audio-visual anti-lectures are a live improvisation jam using found and original images , original experimental sonic capes, and spoke-text. A live performative essay unlike anything you have experienced before.
“It was a layered presentation that inspired conversation in a unique engaging yet thought-provoking flow; an innovative and future-thinking way of sharing knowledge, which centers the intuitive. They are still talking about your Anti-Lecture in the halls of the English Department.”
Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA
“Jamika Ajalon’s work allows new ways to build and disseminate knowledge. Beyond new epistemologies, minority cultures today need new places and these places are not only solid institutions, but also and especially perhaps ways of instituting ephemeral places through speech, image and body. Jamika’s contribution is essential in this perspective as it opens a multidisciplinary field in action, a new political aesthetic.”
Olivier Marboeuf, author, curator, film producer, Paris France
Anti-Lecture Documentary : tap photo to go to video link
Skye Papers Panoptic Anti-lecture (2022-24 performances - including Biennale Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole: Globalisto Expo)
Inter-disciplinary
Audio-visual COSMOS
ALCHEMY OF CUTS: single screen Sonic Poetry Video, 2021-2022 Berlin Museum Of Contemporary Art, “Witches” expo.
Please click photo to be directed to vimeo site.
more links to Jamika’s experimental documentaries/short films and single screen installations to come
SKYE PAPERS
This poetically dynamic novel follows Skye, a black female Jack Kerouac-ian hero,who leaves her Midwestern home for the first time to find people who truly “see” her in ways she has never felt before. Her journey leads to adventures across the Atlantic. From the beginning, we know she is being surveilled, but we don’t know who is doing the watching or why.
“A tightly written and compelling psychedelic adventure.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Skye Papers is a captivating debut, one that melds the personal, political, andartistic into an unforgettable whole.” —Largehearted Boy
“Skye Papers may be Ajalon’s first novel, but she is an experienced artist: a sonicslam poet, musician, multimedia performer and filmmaker with a deep back catalog,evident on every page. From the rhythmic, riffing, incantatory prose to the novel’s cinematic crosscutting and recursive structure, to the minutiae of Skye and her friends’ daily struggles as artists, we get lost in a world that Ajalon renders with precision and lyricism that elude her main character.” —The New York Times
“Set in the street scenes of nineties-era New York City and London, Skye Papers merges race and class, queerness and anarchy, all while keeping a Philip K. Dick–ensian eye on the entities with the power to monitor and control our freedoms. Too real to be sci-fi, with a gritty imagination, Jamika Ajalon’s debut marks the arrival of a formidable new voice, unafraid to bring the creepy quotidian to fantastical conclusions.” —Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints,Confessions and Criticisms
Other hits of Lit
featuring “SkyE Papers PanOptic in 2D”
Globqlisto- un philosphie en movement -Actes d’un imbizo
Publication launch Venice Biennale 2024
editor: Ntshepe Tskere Bopape (Mo Laudi)
jamika ajalon’s poetry,essays, and fictions have been published in numerous publications both litarary and academic over the years, Including Lit Hub , Speculative City and groundbreaking Afro futurist Anthology ‘WE TRAVEL SPACE WAYS’ ( Links embedded in titles !) Scroll down to the archives page for more literary hits and links
MUSIC/sonic
jamika & the argonauts
REBOOTED
The latest album by jamika and the argonauts is the final chapter of the conceptual series “Don’t Feed the Gate-Keepers”. Check out their band camp page (click on on REBOOTED above).
SEE jamika & the argonaut’s latest video: BIG NOSTALGIE MACHINE press photo below
REBOOTED is an ecclectic mix of punky Slam, blusey rock, and electronic groove a fusion of sounds/genre that has something for everyone.
Available wherever good music can be found.
Baldwin En Transit
Recording of the collaborations between jazz musicians (lead composer, stephan payan) and ‘x-pat’ poets (jamika ajalon, mike lad, tamara walcott) -pays homage tothe work of James Baldwin -- centering themes; “home, transit, and of course love”.
STRANGE FEATHER SONICS
(hit photo or title for link)
To catch the latest remixed and new experimental soundtracks / sonic projects on her new “strange feather” bandcamp page HEAR :-)
For more sonic/music archives please scroll down. jamika ajalon has collobrated, featured on, and produced/written over a dozen albums /eps, including 8 albums with french dub band ZENZILE as vocalist /song writer. She has also written numerous scores for various audio visual art and performance pieces. Look out for new releases in 2025
From the archives feature
fugitve: take back
FUGITIVE is a sonic noise poetry experiment based on the book Take Back The Narrative.
Go to the old band camp page and discover other archival collabs with MALIK CRUMPLER on the TITLE UNKNOWN MIXTAPE
Poetical Cosmos Live Performance
Poetical Cosmos Live Performance
LINKS TO COMING SOON
“I would just stare at the sky. For a long time, it seemed nothing happened, except in the worlds created on pages. Outside of that, I was lost” Skye
“I would just stare at the sky. For a long time, it seemed nothing happened, except in the worlds created on pages. Outside of that, I was lost” Skye
meet the Artist
An interdisciplinary artist, author, and lecturer, JAMIKA AJALON has had the fortune of collaborating with brilliant artists worldwide. A creative polymath, she is a writer (poet, novelist, essayist) who employs a mélange of interdisciplinary practices as an extension of her pen (filmmaker, producer, songwriter, electronic digital artist, archivist, performer). Recently, she published the New York Times-reviewed novel “SKYE PAPERS” and completed her album “REBOOTED” (spring 2022). She tours with BALDWIN IN TRANSIT, a jazz poetry ensemble tribute to James Baldwin (Album 2023, Book soon TBA), and has collaborated with renowned artists like Shu Lea Cheng and Ali Cheri, serving as a dialogue consultant for the film “IKU” (2023) and vocalist/interpretation for the art installation “OF MUD AND MEN” (2022 Biennale).
A 2D version of her Anti-Lecture “Skye Papers Panoptic” was published in the book “GLOBALISTO” launched at the 2024 Biennale, with a recent live performance in Brussels as part of the Scores of Narratives festival (spring 2024). She has authored two books of poetry and has been published in several literary magazines and anthologies, including HUB LIT and WE TRAVEL SPACEWAYS. With close to a dozen albums, numerous published writings, exhibitions, and live performances, her intellectual, intuitive, and irreverent work explores themes of memory surveillance, narrative, and the revolutionary power of imagination—from speculative to cosmo-psychedelic. She fuses past and possible futures with a pulse on the present.
Jamika holds a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in Communications in Culture and Society from Goldsmiths University London, with over 20 years of professional experience as a full-time artist.
**ENQUIRIES FOR BOOKING: READINGS/PERFORMANCE/TALKS/BAND -
jamikaajalon(at)gmail.com**
photo by Sara Gor, Paris 2024
find resume on my linked in page here
REWIRING THE MATRIX SHE EXIST IN AZONAL PLACES TRANSMITTING CODE THROUGH RADIO STATIC OASIS
HER RESISTANCE CHARGED WITH ANOMOLIES SHE MUST BE ERASED OR ENCASED ON DISPLAY SHE IS INDEED PART OF HISTORY
AS WE MOVE, WE LEAVE MEMORY SEEDS BEHIND
REWIRING THE MATRIX SHE EXIST IN AZONAL PLACES TRANSMITTING CODE THROUGH RADIO STATIC OASIS HER RESISTANCE CHARGED WITH ANOMOLIES SHE MUST BE ERASED OR ENCASED ON DISPLAY SHE IS INDEED PART OF HISTORY AS WE MOVE, WE LEAVE MEMORY SEEDS BEHIND
“What’s real, as we know, depends on who’s framing the story.”
—-Jamika Ajalon
ARchives
ART sound literary
This page in is under construction but will include archives of previous collaborations musical , published essays poetry stories, sonic & visual art, experimental shorts spanning her poetical life as a writer and artist-polymath.
