Songs of Home, Songs of Change

For the final event of Locating New Orleans: an Exploration on Shaky Ground, Small Center is collaborating with Jebney Lewis, Rick Snow and Christopher Staudinger through A Studio in the Woods to present a viewing, listening, and reading presentation of Songs of Home, Songs of Change.

The Locating New Orleans exhibit draws on maps and mapping to provide a visual exploration of precarity as the central feature of the shifting and interdependent factors within the physical, built, and social environments that construct the landscape of New Orleans. In this light, precarity is expanded historically as well as topically and complicates the construction of New Orleans as ‘resilient’ by focusing on the high costs of resilience to the city and its citizens.

Songs of Home Songs of Change is a cartographic audio installation piece collaboratively created by sculptor, Jebney Lewis, composer and electronic music artist, Rick Snow, writer, Christopher Staudinger, and a host of New Orleans high school students.

This installation features a map of the wards of New Orleans, rendered in steel plates and sonified by electric transducers. The plates play fundamental resonant tones and an array of field recordings. These recordings, and the writings that accompany them, have been gathered and written by over 40 area high­-school students in response to the prompt: “What does home sound like, and what are the sounds of its changing?”

Youth participants will present their writing and have a conversation with writers, educators, and designers: Rebecca Snedeker, Monique Moss, Catherine Michna, Matt Sakakeeny, Kate Kokontis, and Jakob Rosenzweig.