Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

For their Session at Recess, YATTA transforms the gallery into an evolving pre-production environment for Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe, a sound and moving-image installation that will serve as the narrative foundation for the first episode of their podcast and documentary project, Iron + Palm Wine. Named after S.E. Rogie’s song “Koneh Pelawoe,” meaning “Please Open Your Heart,” the project begins with a personal discovery: Rogie, the pioneering Sierra Leonean palm wine musician, was YATTA’s great-uncle.

Through Rogie’s musical legacy, YATTA explores the entanglements of Blackness, land, leisure, and extraction, asking what becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down. Drawing on palm wine music as a balm for the psychic wounds of the transatlantic slave trade, YATTA considers whether Black wandering might offer a healing reversal to the fraught relationship between Black people and U.S. landscapes that are steeped in forced migration and labor.

YATTA’s own writing extends these reflections through a memory of their grandmother, who collected leaves in autumn, let them decompose over winter, and used them to help her garden grow in spring. This act of gathering, waiting, and nourishing new growth becomes another way to consider inheritance: knowledge passed through everyday practices, often long before there is a name for what they teach us.

Brown like

leaves in big hot damp houston

trashbags, the way grandma did it

compressed,

compost before I knew the word.

— YATTA

The installation’s sonic landscape inhabits two opposing structures: a northeastern collegiate ethnomusicology building and a Southern and West African veranda. Sound moves between and converses across these structures, bringing together Rogie’s songs, recorded conversations, archival materials, and YATTA’s compositions of vocals, kora, and field recordings. The collegiate building houses written research, scholarly excavations, and theory, with occasional lectures. Across, the veranda offers reflections, future scholarship, and poetry, opening up alternative approaches to Black knowledge-making. Together, these spaces become a place to listen, read, write, and sing—a way of thinking through what is possible while honoring Black wandering, Black ease, and Black nature songs. Here, visitors are invited to learn about the history of palm wine music alongside the artist.

The collegiate ethnomusicology building emerged, in part, from YATTA’s interest in the white folk and indie music aesthetics that circulated widely in the 2010s: earthy, pastoral, and seemingly untethered to place, embodied by bands like Iron + Wine, whose name this project reworks. From Vampire Weekend sampling S.E. Rogie’s music to Paul Simon’s Graceland, these exchanges raise questions about how sound carries meaning across places, and how music can be received differently from the contexts and histories that shaped it. YATTA is interested in what whiteness yearns for through these exchanges, and what each party gains as music travels across cultural contexts. For African musicians, circulation can offer new audiences and opportunities for global reach; for white Western artists and audiences, African music can become a source of spiritual connection, cultural identity, or proximity to an imagined Africanness. In Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe, YATTA explores these dynamics through sound, family history, and the contrasting spaces of the university and the veranda, asking who gets to wander, what they seek in that wandering, and whose relationship to land is imagined as carefree.

▶︎Play: Koneh Pelawoe (Please Open Your Heart) by S.E. Rogie

Visitors will encounter an evolving space for sound, image, reading, and writing. At its center is an ongoing body of poetry written in response to Camille Dungy’s book Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, alongside an invitation to read a passage aloud, record a response, or write a poem of their own. A record player will play Rogie’s music, while archival materials—including videos relating to Black nature music—will be available to explore. The space may also hold live moments of music-making, experimentation, and collaboration.

The installation encourages visitors to write, listen, and let their minds wander. They may close their eyes, lie down and listen; record themselves reading from the book; or create their own writing in response. Through music, lectures, and newly made sound, the work offers a form of world-building that makes room for deep listening, non-linearity, seasonal learning, and reflection on what is considered legitimate knowledge. The space may also become a site for sharing, including a possible reading of visitors’ written responses.

By bringing Rogie’s music into conversation with YATTA’s creative practice, family history, archival research, and the contributions of visitors, Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe opens space for collective inquiry into the relationships between sound, land, memory, and the body. The installation asks what healing possibilities the sounds of West Africa may hold for the Black South, and what new relationships to land, ease, and one another might become possible when we make space to listen.