Hi. I'm Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. I am also Artistic Director of Prospect.4, the fourth iteration of the citywide triennial in New Orleans, Louisiana.  New Orleans is like no other city in the world, and is completely unique as an American city. It is the most European and the most African city in the United States.  HANK WILLIS THOMAS: The piece is called The History of the Conquest, and it is as much a question as it is a statement, and the question is what is a monument, what is the history of a monument, what are the objects that we preserve and celebrate, what roles do they place in our society? And it’s based off an object that was made for a cabinet of curiosity in 1630 by a man named Jeremias Ritter and it was of this Moor writing, what is a nautilus shell that was turned into a snail. And nautilus shells were used really as a sign of wealth because they were exotic. They were from what would become the colonies of Europe. And there is a Mardi Gras parade reference, because a lot of the early floats would be people on lily pads, and frogs, and because the Bayou played such an important role in the life of people but especially in places of escape for people of African descent, this idea of the conquest where people would go into this new area and inhabit it, and the mythology of what it was like there also kept certain people out. And made it harder to live.
 
  HÔNG-ÂN TRU’O’NG: So, this work is entitled To Speak a Language, and the title comes from Franz Fanon’s book, Black Skins White Masks, where he talks about the sort of psychopathology of subjectivity under colonialism, and the power of language to basically kind of “epidermalize” a certain kind of consciousness into one’s being through speaking and through you know, learning a language. So this piece is a sound sculpture that imitates electrical towers in Vietnam, and these public address speakers that are found all throughout the streets of Vietnam, public address speakers that were installed by the French in the 1950s, so the piece kind of suggests through sound a kind of becoming through sound, through the various different moments in modern history since the French installed those speakers. They installed the speakers to sort of speak to their soldiers and then to speak to you know their subjects, and so, and then were later used by the American army as well, during the American war in Vietnam. So the sounds that you hear are three different sounds. One is a French legionnaire marching song, Jefferson Airplane’s “Do You Want Somebody to Love” a cappella version, and some Vietnamese catholic chanting. The Vietnamese brought Catholicism to Vietnam, well, the Portuguese really did but the French really did it well. They’re the ones who really proselytized it and really made it spread. So, you know, the concept of the piece really is about thinking about sound as a site of discipline and sort of tracing these different moments in sort of sonic history through these speakers.

TREVOR: “Hi everyone, Dave Muller, the artist that happened to have produced this amazing mural is here right now. …This whole mural is something that was inspired by the trip that Dave took here, to New Orleans. But prior to coming here, it’s not like you discover this here, it’s like, he’s been digging and mining music for his whole career. So, I’m going to step aside and let Dave say a few words about the process of creating the mural and some of the works you made and brought with you.  DAVE MULLER: And so I’ve been playing this music on and off for about ten years. Going bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, and so when I got asked to do something here, I thought well, I want to do something that has to do with brass bands. So, one of the amazing things about New Orleans was that Congo Square existed as a place where African American slaves were able to play their instruments, which was the only place pretty much in the United States that they could, everywhere else slave owners took away the kind of instruments that they might have played in Africa, and would not allow them to be played. But here they could on Sundays and I think somehow that’s led to, you know, this whole place being a real hotbed for musical innovation over the years. And there’s all sorts of traditions that I love here. The second line tradition, you know all these kind of things that people play music in a way, I’m a big fan of music that gets played not for making money but because of the pleasure of music. I’m a big fan of folk art, and I’m a big fan of field recordings and music of all sorts of indigenous cultures that people do because it’s their culture and because of enthusiasm and not because of sort of making money. So anyway, somehow that all sort of worked into this. I sort of conflated the landscape of the New Orleans area with various objects that I encountered here that I sort of play off a history, like a story that I’d like to sort of re-tell that other people have re-told in books and things.
 ODILI DONALD ODITA:“Yeah, so Trevor invited me to participate in Prospect with a flag on the ferry. And I asked if we could also extend that project of doing the flag on the ferry onto the land, you know, on inland flags. And, we had some time, cause we weren’t sure if the, if they would actually authorize us to, to allow us to do this or not. And I started just researching flags, and history of the flag, and history of protests with the flag, and particularly protest with the flag because I was thinking about my relationship to the presidential election in America in 2016, the election, and how I felt kind of debilitated – just basically exhausted and wasted after all of it, and not actually making work for a while. Not feeling the energy or the will to make artwork for the longest time after that. As I was thinking about I was just realizing the idea of, you know, what protest is and what it connects to, wanting to liberate and you know the forces that come from liberation and the celebration of what that means. And New Orleans is seen as a city of celebration, on many different levels. But when you examine the aspects, or the auspices of what the celebration is, here in the city, you start to realize that there is so much that goes behind it, its just layers underneath that, and layers beneath those actions. So I started to look into that relatively to the flag. And in this project, it’s as if I’m learning, I’m personally learning about New Orleans, its history and its importance through time and through geography and as well people who are living here are learning about the significance of these different locations and how they connect together, either by the people who were fighting and struggling to make change in these different areas, or how the changes affected one space and another space through a period of time. Through time itself, so, there’s a lot of really unexpected connections that have happened out of this project. And where the idea of community is not necessarily only a city thing, but it becomes really a national thing when we see the precedent of the Plessey vs. Ferguson how that went into the board of education vote. So, um, you know it’s a continual learning project for me. 
  TAIYO Ah, yeah. Yes. Yes. Uh, there was no description, about, yeah, inviting people to sit on it. So, I made these two drawings, there and downstairs. So that people would start to sit on it. But ah, it’s whispering in Japanese. Just uh, he’s telling the name of a, uh, Circuline the name of a station in Tokyo. Next is Tokyo, Tokyo, next is Shibuya, Shibuya, something like that.
 
Njideka Akunyili CROSBY: So I have new work that is up on the wall that may be more overtly political than I’ve done before. And I’ve had people say things like ‘oh this new work is political’ and I don’t agree with it. I think a lot of my work has always been political, just in a different way. Because I think representation is politics. To be in a space like this and have stories coming from a space that has been historically marginalized. And so with this I really do find myself thinking about writers, coming out of the African diaspora, and how starting from Chinua Achebe there has really been this strong push. Achebe was one of the first people to say, we have to tell everyone’s stories, and cant’ wait for someone else to tell it for us otherwise we’re going to just end up with multiple versions of Heart of Darkness (audience laughs). So, that’s a lot of what I started to do. So this actually goes to another question for me which is, lots of times people ask me what artists have influenced me, and I always find myself talking about artists I love, and I always have to say like ‘I can’t really talk about artists I love without talking about the writers I love’ because I feel those have been just as influential on me, as the writers. And I think for me what it was, is the writers I feel have influenced me I feel like we’re kind of doing similar things. So these are writers like Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Binyavanga Wainaina, so people who are writing from spaces that, historically have been marginalized and are coming out and telling their own stories.