Canine-headed monster, bitch-woman, guides into the Mictlan. A voiceless bark, a hairless body, a deformed beautiful being shepherding them and us into the long bright night. Candles light the way, a howled song accompanies through the air among us, and banquet and bacanal-scented air fills the night, tempting us into reverly. So, we dance this night, of all nights, in the liminal space between motion and immobility, between the borders of south and north, between growth and disintegration, between struggle and harmony, the cosmic opposites that keep us moving. In the altar of three levels, where death does not exist, at the intangible phase of the queer in between, we rage in love. Here we howl, we crave, we call, we move in time: backwards, forwards, and then back again; holding the apnea into this moment:

Death does not exist. Follow me.

Carmina Escobar (Mexico City, 1981) is an extreme vocalist, composer, improviser, filmmaker, sound and intermedia artist based in LA. Escobar investigates and expresses emotions, memory spaces, states of alienation, and the possibilities of interpersonal connection through voice performances, installations, experimental theater, interdisciplinary collaboration, new technologies, and video/film pieces that seeks to challenge our understandings of musicality, gender, queerness, race, relationship to nature, and the foundations of human

communication. As an immigrant from Mexico key to her practice is the exploration of interstitial states of being—suspensions between worlds/politics/borders.

She has presented her work at various festivals, biennials, experimental spaces, museums, galleries, concert halls, living rooms, National Parks, and theaters of Mexico, Europe, Cuba, Canada, and USA. Carmina has received three Endowment of The Arts in Mexico, the 2020 FCA Artist award in Music/Sound, and the NPN 2020/2021 Creation Fund Artists for the project Shamana de Cabaret commissioned in part by LACE, New Music USA 2022 Development Fund for the project Vox Clamantis with performance artist Ron Athey.