Name: Le présent éternel, an Opera-in-Progress by Nathalie Joachim
Start: 2025-11-16T19:00
End: 2025-11-16T20:30
Location: Garden Lobby

Performance

No upcoming events

Held on Sun, Nov 16, 2025, 7:00–8:30 p.m.

MoMA, Floor 1, Garden Lobby

The Agnes Gund Garden Lobby

Tickets will be released on November 2nd.

Nathalie Joachim, 2024–25 MoMA Scholar in Residence. Photo: Erin Patrice O’Brien

“Black artistic expression is an invitation to dream into a world of our own making.” —Nathalie Joachim

Join us for a special work-in-progress performance with composer/performer and 2024–25 MoMA Scholar-in-Residence Nathalie Joachim. Joachim will share a first public preview of her forthcoming electroacoustic opera, developed during her time at MoMA. The project reimagines and reinterprets music associated with Caribbean, American, and Pan-African freedom movements, using the Haitian revolution as point of departure. Written in 12 parts, it pulls from a variety of historical texts—including iterations of the Haitian and United States constitutions and the 12 principles of the vodou ceremony of Bwa Kayiman—that offer powerful perspectives on the relationship between democracy and freedom. Joachim finds inspiration in the legacy of Black Surrealists, Afrofuturists, and afrodiasporic spiritual and storytelling practices to create this sonic dream for collective liberation.

Joachim will be joined by singers Nathalie Cerin & Laurin Talese. Sound design by Mark Grey.
The music will be followed by a conversation moderated by Leah Dickerman, MoMA’s director of Research Programs.

Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated Haitian-American performer and composer committed to storytelling as a form of human connection and cultural awareness. She is regularly commissioned to write for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, dance, and interdisciplinary theater. Her album Fanm d’Ayiti, based on an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet, and electronics, celebrates and explores her Haitian heritage, and received a Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album. Joachim’s sophomore album, Ki moun ou ye, an intimate examination of ancestral connection and self, was co-released by Nonesuch Records and New Amsterdam Records in early 2024. Joachim is an assistant professor of composition at Princeton University and a 2024–25 MoMA Scholar in Residence. She is an alumnus of the Juilliard School and the New School.

This program is organized by MoMA’s Department of Research Programs.

The MoMA Scholars in Residence program is supported by the Ford Foundation.

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