In celebration of Black History Month 2025, There’s Always More, the American Academy in Rome hosts a screening of The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist (2022).

The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist is a chamber opera-theater work by composer Jonathan Berger (2017 Fellow), artist Enrico Riley (2017 Fellow), and poet Vievee Francis that responds to the murder of Eric Garner and the ongoing loss of Black life at the hands of authorities. The work leverages the power of music, text, dance, and visual art to create a deeply moving meditative experience that aims to evoke empathy and understanding and to spur activism beyond the stage. The universal international relevance of the work is palpable, as we see the reverberations of similar acts of violence in every country across the globe. The specific situation of Ritual of Breath becomes a metaphor for anywhere such actions take place as it evokes the reality of “the other” in our world. Erica, the center of this experience, has lost her father to police violence. An artist and activist, she calls on her community to create and participate in a ritual of healing. Her action captures the profound intimacy of personal loss as well as how communities gather around those affected. The performance unfolds across seven movements and concludes with a summons for the audience to determine their own path forward in the fight for social justice. 

After the screening, Jonathan Berger, Enrico Riley, and Vievee Francis will be in conversation with Italy-based poet, artist, and writer Wissal Houbabi and podcast host and activist Benedicta Djumpah, moderated by AAR Curator-at-Large Johanne Affricot.

The following day, February 20, the public is invited back to the Academy to participate in an activation and ritual related to The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist. There will be a screening of Her Fight, His Name: The Story of Gwen Carr and Eric Garner (2024), a documentary that chronicles Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of the NYPD sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. In an effort to foster dialogue, poets, artists, and scholars are encouraged to bring artistic reflections to share with the group.

The event is in collaboration with the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

Biographies

Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Jonathan Berger has also received major commissions from The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music America, and numerous chamber music societies and ensembles. Recent commissions include his operas, My Lai (commissioned by The National Endowment, the Gerbode Foundation, and Harris Theatre), and Leonardo (commissioned by the 92nd Street Y for baritone Tyler Duncan), and his song cycle, Rime Sparse (commissioned by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society and premiered in New York and Chicago, with soprano Julia Bullock, and members of Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society). Berger’s most recent recording is Smithsonian-Folkways’ recording of My Lai with the Kronos Quartet, Rinde Eckert, and Van Anh Vo. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and the 2016 Elliot Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University.

Benedicta Djumpah is the host and creator of the podcast The Chronicles of a Black Italian Woman. She is an activist for citizenship rights for Italians born or raised in Italy to foreign parents and focuses on antiracism. She was born and raised in the province of Brescia, Northern Italy, and from a very young age, she has been passionate about politics and social justice. She is a graduate in International Relations from London Metropolitan University and holds an LLM in International Relations from UNINT University in Rome. In 2018, Djumpah represented Rosa Parks in the short award-winning movie Io Sono Rosa Parks. Also in 2018, Djumpah was selected to participate in the Policy School founded by former Prime Minister Enrico Letta. From January 2018 until June 2023, she worked with Temple University Rome and she worked on promoting diversity and inclusion among students, faculty, and staff. She has also coordinated Black History Month at Temple Rome with the aim to celebrate the African Diaspora in Italy. She currently works at NYU Florence.

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: most recently The Shared World (2023); Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Her work has appeared widely. Francis wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist. She has received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Forthcoming are two books of poetry, a memoir, and from Poland, Selected Works.

Wissal Houbabi is a performance poet, artist, writer, artistic director of Spore, and a hip-hop head. Through her poetry, she aims to break the boundaries of linguistics and poetic language, using words like clay and questioning the relationship between languages and dialects, between sound, stigma, and meaning. Her work has a declared political perspective, linking the pursuit of beauty with dignity and considering poetic research as a radical search for the “we.” She has conducted workshops, programs, and poetry projects with various cultural and artistic institutions, including Iuav, Goethe-Institut, Museo delle Civiltà, and MUDEC. Among her works: La Madelaine de Proust – La Vache qui Rit, published in Visible: Art as Policies for Care. Socially Engaged Art (2010–Ongoing); Una gran puzza di merda nell’aria, presented at the Milano Re-Mapped Summer Festival, Compraverde 23, and the XV Abba Cup; Attitudine. Anatomia di un occhio tagliato (Einaudi, 2023); phonomuseum_rome at the Museo delle Civiltà; Offesissima at Ar/ge Kunst Bolzano, and much more.

Enrico Riley is the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He currently lives in Norwich, VT. Riley received a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Visual Arts, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in painting. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions include Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, The American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH. He is a core creative collaborator for the transdisciplinary Opera, The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist that was performed at Lincoln Center For the Arts in the summer of 2024. Riley’s work had been reviewed in Art New England, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, and the New York Times. His work is held in both private and public collections including: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Columbus Museum, and The Hood Museum of Fine Art. He is represented by Jenkins-Johnson Gallery.