Artist
Erik Thurmond

Project Title
Pasquale

Grant Amount
Travel Grant - $2,000

Website
https://pasquale.live

Project Description

Pasquale is artist Erik Thurmond’s pop music avatar. Pasquale blends avant-garde performance practices and mystical spirituality to create dance-floor reckonings. The name Pasquale holds multiple valences; it is the artist’s biological great-grandfather’s name, and it was the nickname his biological parents gave him prior to learning the name his adoptive parents chose. This linguistic heritage underscores the project’s push to unearth an authentic self, questioning constraining norms, expectations, and conditions. Thurmond will use the Idea Capital Travel Grant for travel to Naples, Italy, to research the birthplace of his project’s namesake: his biological great-grandfather. Naples, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, provides access to cultural and personal histories that will inform the Pasquale project. Connecting to familial roots and Neapolitan culture, Erik will develop his research into new performance materials to share with audiences in Atlanta and beyond.