Demian DinéYazhi’ & Kevin Holden: Shatter

SHATTER/// is an extractive performance: an eclipse of electronic sound, poetry, and acts of destruction amplified into a cathartic shattering of the racist stereotypes that have, for centuries, violated the rights, sacrality, and complexities of Indigenous cultural identity.

Performers Demian DinéYazhi’, transdisciplinary Indigenous Diné artist and poet, and Intermedia composer and sound artist Kevin Holden (Diné, Irish, German, and Norwegian) absorb and endure the brutality of history in order to explode its power and allure.

DinéYazhi’’s poetry is fierce, confessional, and lyrical, embracing nature as a queer indigenous body. Holden’s electronic soundscapes and searing guitar melt space and time into raw transcendence, recalling the Indigenous punk movement.

SHATTER/// becomes a ritual of sacrifice and transformation as it escalates to deafening peaks of language and sound, challenging white audiences to awaken to the realities of Indigenous experience. The work is a tour-de-force celebration of collective forgetting, erasure, and liberation.

The artists dedicate this performance to the life and memory of their cousin, Lee Renee Anderson, as well as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans, Femmes, 2Spirit, and Queer relatives.

Demian DinéYazhi´ (b. 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it occupies and refuses to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual

Kevin Holden is an artist and composer based in and around Portland, Oregon.