Who

Ashley Hunt is an artist and activist. He uses video, photography, mapping and writing to engage social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. He is interested in structures that allow people to accumulate power and those which keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know, respond to and conceive of themselves within these structures.

What

A performance that acts as a dismantled film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images, and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience. Exploring the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera and microphone in the months following the storm, it recounts Hunt’s engagement with community activists while researching the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison.

Why

It raises themes of architecture, cameras, and visibility; and the powers of speech, silence, art, and journalism in a moment of crisis; of disaster, race, law and witnessing at a time when the urgency of Katrina’s crisis seems to have receded into a comfortable past