Times Reflection brings Indigenous Filipinx music and folk-noir banjo to Vines Art Festival, August 7
Ghostly Hounds, Babette Santos, and Ricardo are among the artists performing at free Pandora Park event
Francesca Mirai of Ghostly Hounds. Photo by Val Lalune
Babette Santos.
Vines Art Festival presents Times Reflection at Pandora Park on August 7 at 6 pm
SOULFUL FOLK-NOIR outfit Ghostly Hounds, Mozambique-born composer Ricardo, and Kathara Society artistic director Babette Santos are among the artists performing at Times Reflection.
Part of this year’s Vines Art Festival, the free event at Pandora Park will feature music, dance, and poetry that honour the cycle of creation—planting seeds, watching them blossom, and allowing them to return to the land.
Ghostly Hounds is the project of Francesca Mirai, a Victoria-based singer-songwriter and banjo player who makes old-time music. They are known for their haunting sound and clear, soaring vocals, evident on tracks such as “Moving On” from their latest album, In the Rubble (see below, performed live in a friend’s dinghy in the waters off South Pender Island).
Santos founded Kathara Society, an Indigenous Filipinx arts collective, in 2003. They specialize in dance, movement, and martial arts. Ricardo, meanwhile, expands the concept of radio pop with hip-hop, Afrobeat, gospel, and R&B influences. He immigrated to Canada from Mozambique at age five—just a few years after the civil war in his birth country ended—and infuses his music with personal storytelling by drawing on his life journey.
Other performers at the event include multidisciplinary artists Sussan Yáñez and Samay Taki, and emerging choreographers Bryn Bridgen and Linnea Goldstrom. Black genderqueer poet Katia Asomaning will share queer propaganda with thoughts on healing, interconnectedness, and collective liberation. And artist group Out of Oat Milk, from Enable: Arts Society, will offer a performance geared toward breaking open binaries and exploring the meaning of community.
Two workshops will take place during the event, one of which is Bonded Links, a hands-on chainmail-making activity hosted by Bill Barnes of HOMOHARDWARE that uses the craft as a metaphor for queer kinship. Several installations will also be set up at the park, including Amy Bao’s interactive kinetic piece Jacob’s Ladder, a mechanical exploration of the titular toy.
There’s much more on offer at Times Reflection, with a full schedule posted on the Vines website. No tickets are required to attend the event; it will start at 6 pm and continue to sundown. 
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