Josh Ente and Bob Weisz's music video celebrates a New Orleans that's moved beyond Hurricane Katrina.

Until now, I’ve approached this column with my blinders on and my sleeves rolled up, focusing on heavy art-world discourse instead of opening the discussion to other media. But now the promise of warm weather has me looking outward, and my eyes are wandering to New Orleans, where my college roommate from the Northeast has recently moved and, like me, is adjusting to life as a newcomer to the South. Relocating from Brooklyn (by way of Wilmette, Illinois), filmmaker Josh Ente was lured to the bayou to work on location as a set dresser for Beasts of the Southern Wild. After the production wrapped, he decided to make New Orleans his home.

Josh Ente wades through the bayous of Louisiana during the filming of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Ever since college, Ente and I have been exchanging notes on our experiences in cities around the world. Now that both of us have settled in the South with some permanence, we now walk parallel paths navigating through new cultural landscapes. As a newcomer to New Orleans, Ente’s perspective gives me a unique insight into the city and the visual culture experienced there every day.

My consciousness of New Orleans has been almost entirely informed by Hurricane Katrina. Art events like Prospect.1 (click here for BURNAWAY‘s article from 2009) and projects by the TRANSFORMA collective have contributed to a visual culture that continues to revolve around the profound effects of the hurricane.

But the city also has developed a myriad of local institutions that defy the disaster tourism inspired by Katrina and the BP oil spill. These groups thrive despite it all. Life is Art Foundation (formerly KK Projects), for example, initially came to fruition by commissioning installations in homes destroyed by the hurricane, but today that effort has transformed into a multi-disciplinary nonprofit committed to site-specific installation art, urban gardening, and community-building.

Click above to watch the music video for “Y’all Get Back Now.”

Josh Ente and Bob Weisz recently directed the debut music video for Big Freedia, a queer transgendered Bounce performer, that has received critical acclaim from Stereogum and Vimeo. Although technically a product of club culture, Bounce has become the focus of cultural and social analysis that addresses issues of public, performance, and space — issues I regularly harp on, but through examples in an entirely different medium.

The following is a transcript of my interview with Ente mapping the course of his negotiation of visual culture of New Orleans, and how it differs from the New York art scene.

Kristin Juárez: How were you approached to direct Big Freedia’s video for “Y’all Get Back Now?”

Josh Ente: The reason this music fell into my lap is because I’m part of Court 13, a group of filmmakers in New Orleans. And because DJ Rusty Lazer, Freedia’s de-facto manager, lives two blocks away. I became a part of Court 13 by making the movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and even more a part by staying in New Orleans and now having been a director. It is a support system, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity without them.

KJ: How were you introduced to Bounce culture, and how would you describe it?

JE: I came to Bounce through this project. Bounce is carefree. It’s not bogged down, and it doesn’t seek the problematic in a way that academic approaches to cultural movements can do. It’s approached in a way that is affirming and inclusive. This allowed me be a part of it even without realizing how big of a culture it was here, because I was pretty new to the city.

After I said I’d like to learn more, there immediately was space for me in the culture. It was not a feeling I was familiar with coming from New York or Wesleyan University where everyone stakes out their identity, clings onto it, and can be protective, withholding, and guarding of it. Here, Bounce is an “everyone invited” sort of thing, and that’s what I tried to put out there in the video. My participation in Bounce culture is the exact point of it. It’s a participation-based experience: musically, with the call-and-response of the actual songs, and through dance, which most obviously defines the experience.

Especially when it comes to the dancing which is so hyper-sexualized, it’s for you as the dancer. You’re not performing for other people; you’re performing for yourself, for the solidarity and freedom of your body, and for the expression of that. It’s a powerful movement to be a part of — movement in the cultural sense and movement in the very literal sense when I’m being shouted out by Freedia to put my hands on the floor and put my ass in the air.

KJ: How mainstream is Bounce in New Orleans?

JE: It’s not necessarily mainstream, but it’s everywhere. Freedia will perform at sports bars, strip clubs, bars in the hood, wherever. It can happen anywhere. I even saw a show she did at a printmaking shop. Bounce makes space for itself, within the culture and physically in any room.

Bounce has been around as a genre for about 20 years, and Freedia is part of a handful of queer transgendered performers. You can’t find them on the internet; you have to go to the corner store and get a burned CD. The notion of making space for self-expression is what’s really going on at a Bounce show — and in my neighborhood, The Bywater, which the reason why I’m here. Life just happens in the street here. I don’t know if it’s because it’s hot and everyone wants to be outside, but I’m fortunate enough that, in my neighborhood, there are a lot of gallery spaces and performances venues that don’t put limits of what can happen there.

Establishing shots in Big Freedia's music video show recognizable characteristics of New Orleans street culture. Here, neighbors startle at the sound of some giant invading their city.

Citizens look up to see Big Freedia stomping through downtown New Orleans like a glittery Godzilla.

KJ: How would you characterize the art scene in New Orleans?

JE: There’s art on the street, people selling art on the street, and opportunities that are the product of a city where people like to stand out on the corner at a bar. Everyone’s really creative and interested in discussion, and, out of that, there comes a space where cultural production happens. This is a small city where there is no epicenter. But all things happen in moments and in small scales, and it’s woven into the fabric of the city. Everyone is invited to participate. You are welcome if you make yourself welcome. If you go to Bounce show, you don’t have to pop your ass. But you will want to, and that’s okay. You’re invited.

There’s a big thing about reciprocity here, and that limits and discourages damaging appropriations of different cultures. If you’re going to take, you better give. Bounce is something that is worth considerable academic thought. But the great thing about being in New Orleans is that it’s not about finding the problematic. It’s about doing what’s good, taking it seriously, and having it be viable, meaningful, and complicated. That’s something I’ll be a part of.

Josh Ente finishes some dirty work on the set of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

During our interview, Ente raised several relevant issues concerning self-expression, performance and performativity, and reciprocity as it relates to the arts in New Orleans and his position within the city. With inspired insight, he continues to map out this new space, defining the streets as sites for cultural production where New Orleans’s  mainstream and subcultures overlap.

The art scenes of New York and Los Angeles, the cities that Ente and I left behind, are certainly steeped in history and clout, but our experiences in New Orleans and Atlanta allow us the freedom to forge new paths — largely because of the openness and generosity of these communities. Southern hospitality is alive and well.

Kristin Juárez is a recent transplant from Los Angeles conducting a fellowship at the High Museum of Art. This column maps her exploration of Atlanta’s art scene as a newcomer. With one foot testing the water of local arts practice and the other firmly planted in a greater landscape of cultural production, Juárez uses both to gauge the potential of the visual arts to impact our lives. How can art provide meaningful, sustained discourse that will help us articulate, and be held accountable for, what is at stake in the world today?

Note: Kristin Juárez will return to BURNAWAY in June after taking short vacation from writing. Check our archives to read more columns from The Fringe.