Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing | Art & Artists

Performance

When developing The Long Count (2022), Debit (Delia Beatriz) researched Mayan wind instruments, then created digital instruments and used machine learning to compose music for them. No musical notation system remains from the ancient Maya, whose cities collapsed in the eighth and ninth centuries CE and whose culture was further undermined by colonialism and genocide. Debit’s composition imagines a reanimation of musical forms whose existence has been limited to abstractions posited by archaeologists and musicologists, and does so in a way that implies the breath of the people who first played these instruments. The otherworldly sound of the music all the while underscores how little we know about those musicians. Taking its title from archaeologists’ name for the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, the work reflects on the fundamental question of who is entitled to tell these ancient musicians’ stories.