Cultural ecosystem grows with Vines Art Festival

Originally published in The Georgia Straight - Read more

There’s no denying that the Vines Art Festival is well-named. Vancouver’s annual summer celebration of environmentally oriented art is as tenacious as ivy, as sprawling as honeysuckle, and sometimes as prickly as that bountiful bane of every Pacific Northwest garden, the Himalayan blackberry. Its blossoms are sweet, however, and one of its fruits will be a deeper collective understanding of the place where we live—its ecology, its human history, the way it continues to grow, and the way we might change it for the better.

Loosely speaking, the themes of this year’s festival are cultural exchange, migration, transformation, and personal growth—and there’s no better exemplar of those qualities than Kin Balam, who’ll perform at the Breaking Borders event at Creekside Park next Thursday (August 15). Balam, who was born Balam Axayacatl Santos Antonio, is Indigenous, hailing from the Nahua people of El Salvador, and he’s a highly skilled flamenco guitarist, having trained with Roma masters in Spain. His music also incorporates Mesoamerican rhythms and political hip-hop. His activist father was abducted and tortured by right-wing death squads during El Salvador’s bloody civil war, which qualified the Santos family for political asylum in Canada. And after spending time on the streets of Winnipeg, he’s become a focused and articulate spokesperson for Canada’s growing Latin-American population, especially youths.

“What got me out of the street life was the political and cultural awareness of my parents,” Balam explains, in a telephone interview from his South Vancouver home. “That influenced me to really see things differently, because we come from a people that has a long history in rebellion and revolution. That implies an awareness of the land, an awareness of community, and an awareness of empathy. You know—love, kindness, peace, and harmony.…So I changed my life completely—and what I held on to was music, because I had always had music in my life.”

He adds that his search for his own musical sound coincided with the need to connect with the culture his family had, unwillingly, left behind.

“We can’t allow our identity to be erased, and so I began this search for what Indigenous music was,” he explains. “And then I started creating my own flutes, my own whistles, and learning the archaeology behind it—the history, the meaning, as well as the cosmo-vision, which is the way our ancestors saw their world. Their philosophy, basically, which is related to music, which is related to spirituality, which is related to the way you live.”

Part of that Mesoamerican world-view, Balam continues, is an identification with the natural world so intense that some people actively seek to incorporate forest archetypes into their nature. His own given name means “jaguar”; Kin Balam, then, is “the way of the jaguar”, an apt analogy for the fierce passion and sinuous elegance of his hybrid music.

“In our culture, our native culture, the jaguar is a very ancient symbol,” he says. “For thousands of years, through archaeology, there are jaguar heads in stone, on instruments, on the pyramids and the temples. There are temples dedicated just to jaguars. And so, for me, the way of the jaguar is the way to our true identity as a people.

“But it’s not just about Indigenous people from my culture,” he adds. “I think it translates as, I guess, a way to a deeper truth.”