Multiple venues, including the Barbican Centre, London and Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome
September 2023
When pioneering Detroit Techno DJ, electronic music composer, and producer Jeff Mills encountered Chris Ofili’s watercolor Harvester (2021) in an exhibition at the Tate Britain pairing Ofili and William Blake, he was inspired to turn the small-scale work into a backdrop for performances by his group Tomorrow Comes the Harvest.
The Harvester backdrop, printed at 27 feet wide, was first used for a Tomorrow Comes the Harvest performance at the Barbican, London, in September 2023. Mills played alongside Jean-Phi Dary, a keyboardist, singer, producer, arranger, and songwriter, and Prabhu Edouard, a percussionist and composer. The Harvester backdrop has since appeared in Rome, Berlin, Dublin, Luxembourg, Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney (among other concerts), and it will continue to tour in the company of an evolving lineup of musicians.
In Ofili’s work, the Harvester is a mythical figure who exists in a symbiotic relationship of abundance with his environment, simultaneously sowing and reaping the golden, seed-like forms that travel between him and the living flowers beneath. Giving and receiving become indistinguishable, just as the bee fertilizes the flower with pollen and collects its nectar in one and the same action. For Mills, “the seeds that the Harvester has sown could be the seeds of anything: the seeds of an idea, the seeds of a community.”
Tomorrow Comes the Harvest is a cross-genre project that Mills co-founded in 2018 with Afrobeat musician Tony Allen that uses intimately collaborative improvisation to approach higher levels of consciousness.