Christopher Joshua Benton. A Lore Supreme

Partially embedded in the sand, Benton's mirrored sphere reimagines the disco ball as a map, an archive and a meeting place. Towering 27-feet into the Miami sky and expanding 44-feet across, this kinetic sculpture features 7,000 mirrored facets that move with the wind, creating the appearance of a giant spinning disco ball. Its re-imagined geography reflects the countries that have contributed to Miami's cultural landscape and its connections to Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America are central to the work, which considers how rhythms, languages and musical forms move with people and change through encounter. Throughout the day, the artwork transforms between sculpture, public plaza, and concert venue—purposefully conceived by the artist as a temporary civic space activated by an ambitious program of music, performance, and public gatherings. Benton's practice begins with fieldwork, oral histories and conversations with the people whose experiences inform a project. For the Miami commission, his research brings him into contact with musicians, producers, DJs, educators and others working in the city's music communities. The installation centers the influence of diasporic communities on dance music, tracing relationships across forms such as disco, dancehall, dembow, descarga, salsa, house and techno. Embedded speakers will carry a sound work developed with local voices. Visitors will be able to move around the sphere and encounter different fragments of conversation and music. Rather than presenting a single, closed account of musical history, the project treats that history as ongoing: an exchange that continues as communities, sounds and stories change. Over 7,000 individual mirrored facets transform the sculpture into a dynamic kinetic work, each reflecting light outward in a new direction. The sculpture's mirrored surface will reflect the beach, sky and people around it. The sand itself becomes the dance floor, creating a temporary landmark where listening, movement and social life meet. Miami is one of those places where the city itself feels like a dance floor, a shared space where different cultures and communities come together, each bringing their own rhythm while moving alongside one another. My research has taken me all over the city: I practiced some salsa at a pirate radio station, embodied the orishas at a Cuban folkloric dance class, went crate digging with local DJs, sang in a community choir, dived into local archives, played with drum machines at a recording studio, and learned the güiro over a Cuban sandwich at an iconic eatery in Little Havana. And of course, there was so much dancing!