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Open Fell
Saturday, July 11, 2026 | 4pm
Location: Slash (1150 25th St, San Francisco)
Free event

Open Fell is a format for exploration of earthly passing. A seminary of passing, optimized for voice. Word and tone dispersed across a room in a quadraphonic field. Room as open field. An improvised voice dwells in the going-under, a secondary line tracing through the space.

Fumi Okiji is an improvisor and vocalist. The uneasy marriage of lyric and free improvisation, ballad’s quiet predictability alongside the hazard and caprice of extemporized form, continues to orient her music-making. She uses her voice, sometimes extended through audio processing, to share songs, standards, prose and improvised ideas. Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, working across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies; her most recent book is Billie’s Bent Elbow (Stanford University Press, 2025).

Yiming Clara is an artist raised in Beijing, living and working in Berkeley. She is interested in the language in things beyond words, and the things that can’t fit squarely within language. With an interest in how we move about in the world between those surfaces of material and of social construction, her work takes impressions of the familiar as medium and constructs situations that open onto new potential worlds.