As an Afro Latina who has spent nearly the entirety of my life in the Americana South, and the entirety of my adulthood between my hometown Atlanta, Savannah, and New Orleans, it’s fair for me to say that there is no time like the present in these locations. Because the Deep South is forever, its existence transcends linear time in its capacity to reflect the truths of globalization. Contemporary Art today often employs site activation as means to idealize futurisms of indigeneity and trans migratory resistance. Artistic discourse around decolonial visions of Latine/Caribbean culture representing the Global South, may similarly rely on mythos, temporal interactions with the past, and escapism from the present into the future. Interacting as a Harbinger. Prospect New Orleans’ sixth iteration, The Harbinger is Home organized by Artistic Directors , Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson, challenges and seeks the context of New Orleans, Louisiana in site responsive, satellites.
In its full integrity, New Orleans is still a site unseen for its ability to preserve its own culture. New Orleans built New Orleans before American dominance in the western world. She was originated by its own Black Indigenous ethnic group even beyond its migratory patterns of the past. Today in its Americana realization, New Orleans is still simultaneously the northernmost Caribbean ecology. To be clear, there’s no level of tourism that harbinger could predict to rewrite history and call New Orleans home, but the harbinger may very well rely on the triennial as a temporal pantomime, showing how diasporic bodies can too transcend occupancy.
If one begins their Latine discourse with The French Quarter, there’s an employment of historical cartography via Prospect venues en route to Arabi, Louisiana. Didier William’s A Gesture to Home (2024) engages folklore with ecological politics at The Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street. The relationship between William’s sculptures and paintings pull on the Atchafalaya Basin. In William’s work, their eye motif on the figurative sculptures, creates a reflective surveillance.
The Atchafalaya Basin is Louisiana’s most economically productive site, larger than that of the Florida everglades near Miami, where the artist immigrated from Haiti. Here, the works also provokes a sense of accountability, juxtaposing the paintings of an undisrupted basin. The figures are emerging out of cyprus tree stumps. While these stumps are iconic for their nub, appendage-like shapes, the figures, camouflaged and androgynous, transcend these proofs of ecological extraction and debunking the discourse around the Caribbean and New Orleans being primarily connected by “natural disaster” and all forms of colonialism alike. Their gestural emergences seem almost in a ritualistic dance as the viewer is confronted with them while navigating the exhibit. While typically, William’s subjects are existing in conjunction with the landscape in their work. It would seem that the figures have emerged out of a conjuring beyond site.
So what are the intervals between Black New Orleans and these ideations of the third south?
In the context of Didier William’s site activation, the exhibition creates a feeling of escape, or maybe even revolt. Could Bblack Americana be escaping the French Quarter? In some way this is my first site of the harbinger, foreshadowing to these futurisms that many of the works in Prospect 6 aim to communicate while displaying hybrid visualizations of land and body.
St. Bernard Parish, a site that evokes the timing of the Louisiana Purchase, I make my way to the decommissioned Ford Motor Plant. Suddenly the employment of camouflage within colonial discourse is unveiled by exploring the coexistence of this siting of urban decay where the Ford Model-T was once produced with materials from South America. The plant is walking distance to the infamous Domino Sugar Factory, all along the bank of the Mississippi River. It’s through the Peruvian, New Orleans based, artist, Blas Isasi’s 1,001,532 CE (2023-2024) that the mechanics of Andean cosmopolitics work in tandem with late stage capitalism’s discourse. A the light passes through the second floor of the Ford motor plant, the non linear sequences of sculptural encounters between the structural columns on the building, communicates that the future is past in the industrial barrenness. The symmetry of site as a way of material return, as a postapocalyptic body, the works are heavily inspired by the Incan massacre of Cajamarca, en Nueva Orleans.
Isasi’s trees emerging from stone have different responses to the humidity, some warping in response to being relocated, some with gestures that are adverse to fragility, a dance as what the artist describes as vertical carcasses. These interactions are unintentionally allegorical to the arctic winds that travel through the Pacific to Lima’s coast and arrive humid, being of many places at once, like mass production and perhaps cosmically an amalgamation of interactions with many times and places at once as well. Isasi’s sculptural parody of the Andean mountains, the underlyings of the land sprouts hair and mechanical arms. On top there is the peyote cactus is sovereign, as it spirals in gesture and and is medicinally used for psychedelic purposes, speaking to how this land despite a site of battle for the Incans, still has a mind of its own.
The hybridity of modern and natural material design allows moments for land to visualize accountability. Like the landscape with the multicolored penis growing blonde hair, it shows isolated moments of the postcolonial, as a petri dish, removed from its dominance of the land, leaving patriarchy to queer itself. Another side of the same sculpture is crevice with a finger painting down to it, followed by an isolated explosion, superpositioning gender from many angles as a proxy resisting colonialism despite how the structure materials are supported by steel. This juxtaposition is integral to not denying what has become of extracting the resources sourced after the battle, to produce the future of mass production. Other moments, like the stone appendage with braided hair, and what appears to be fossilized water deposits, leading to two fingers pinching on the other end, feel more futuristically anthropological. This appendage communicates ecology’s cosmic take over, despite again being surrounded by mechanical arms. These accents of post-war in a site play on hard geometries that historically are built with adobe materials on Lima’s coastline. Perhaps as Prospect’s harbinger is searching for home, it’s suggesting that the temporalities of time and site require a visual context for what ground zero means. And what it would take to alchemize into a state that is uninterrupted by man. For home in pantomime, may only exist in the diasporic body’s performance. History can not be rewritten, and must be resurfaced to continue, the day ecology takes over. A very important lesson narrated by New Orleans herself.
Prospect.6 was on view in New Orleans from November 2, 2024 through February 2, 2025.
