Documenting The Colour Out Of Space

Amy Mackie and Ricardo Barba, who are running the artspace PARSE in the Central Business District, invited us to curate an exhibition in their space in 2015. This was the first time we as Deltaworkers had the opportunity to showcase ourselves to the city by way of exhibition making. We came up with a format for a rotating exhibition: 3 films by international makers, Terrence Nance, Melanie Bonajo and Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorentz, were on continues display. One of these films was projected while the other two were shown on a flatscreen. The moment a film ‘premiered’ in the projection room we organised an event where we asked local artists and academics to react to the thematics the film dealt with. Read more about it in the press release for The Colour Out Of Space.

A lot of documentation was shot and we wanted to share some of it with y’all.

Photos by Jacob Dwyer, Maggie McWilliams, Maaike Gouwenberg and Guy Tem. Many thanks to everyone who made this possible: all the artists involved, PARSE, Prospect New Orleans, Xavier University, May Gallery, David Sullivan, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Fonds Kwadraat (f.k.a Het Materiaalfonds).

Chattel and Bone // Sonic Circumnavigations

Wednesday November 4th from 2PM to 4PM, radio talk by Janna Graham, at WTUL (91.5 FM) during The Tripple ya Tripple ya oh Zee show with DJ Domatron.

Janna Graham is a sound artist and radio producer based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (Canada). She is a community radio advocate who believes in the power of participatory media. Her work has been broadcast on public and community radio across the country and on low-power pirate transmissions in her neighborhood. During her residency at Deltaworkers, Janna is researching the power of song and story to preserve language in South Louisiana. As a Canadian of Acadian descent, she’s gathering material for a series of site-specific sound installations in Acadian Canada.

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Yellowknife

During The Tripple ya Tripple ya oh Zee show with DJ Domatron Janna will tell more about her research and play some clips from older works.

Supported by:

The origins of Fried Chicken

One of my favourite things to do in the Southern States is road tripping. Obviously my life here is largely determined by the needs and whereabouts of the residents. If one of them wants/needs to undertake a road trip and time permits me to tag along I always do a little dance of joy. At the very start of the 2015 residency period, when Jacob Dwyer was the only resident that had arrived yet, our landlady Dawn DeDeaux needed to get some things from her studio in Fairhope, Alabama. Jacob, Maaike and me all jumped in the car and off we went.

Sunset at Fairhope

Sunset at Fairhope

Two things I like to do when road tripping in the U.S. are listening to the country radio channel and laugh about poetic gems like ‘She Cranks My Tractor’, ‘Redneck Crazy’ or ‘Drunk on a Plane’, and talking about food. Locals aren’t usually so into laughing about cheesy country songs and since Dawn was with us we spent the ride talking about food. Days before we had entered a discussion about which place in New Orleans served the best fried chicken, probably because the landmark closest to our new compound is a Popeyes. Now we were wondering where fried chicken actually comes from. Most U.S. foods can be traced back to European, African or even Asian dishes quite easily. For fried chicken none of us was very sure. It’s definitely one of the most popular foods in the South and we thought we might be on to one of the very few truly U.S. foods here!

popeyes-2

Not entirely sure about this I did what we do these days in such situations: I searched Wikipedia. Turns out that fried chicken comes from Scotland and West Africa, two countries from which a very large part of the Southern people originally came. The Scots in search for freedom and independence, the people from several West African countries as slaves. Scots would fry chicken in lard unlike the rest of North Europe, where they would usually bake chicken. But the most important influence on the taste of fried chicken today came from the West African slaves: the spices in the batter. Slaves were usually allowed to keep a few chickens and they would fry them on special occasions, adding local spices to increase the flavour.

The rest of the trip we spent thinking of an original U.S. food that one could eat with class and dignity, without getting sauce and/or grease all over the place. We concluded at Waffle House eating bacon, eggs, hash browns and pecan waffles for breakfast. We did eat with knifes and forks.

wafflehouse

Thunder Cheese Circle

A true addict speaking from the heart

This late summer I arrived early at Camp Abundance Bee Farm (Deltaworkers HQ for the coming years). After stepping into the compounds garden I received a warm welcome of Dawn DeDeaux, our land lady. Not only is Dawn DeDeaux a true New Orleanian and great artist but also the only female winner ever of the Demolition Derby at the Super Dome in New  Orleans. So she knows how to rock. The welcome this time was accompanied by Popeye’s fried chicken (more about that soon) but most important were the Old Fashioned and Thunder Cheese, the real smoothers at the compound.

Dawn DeDeaux

Old Fashioned is the first cocktail Joris and I ever drank in New Orleans. Dawn’s specific Old Fashioned recipe: whiskey, oranges, bitters, maraschino cherries and some magic that none of us campers will ever match.

On to the Thunder Cheese, another magic snack that is so overwhelming in taste that once your mouth has come in contact with it, t, this seductive devil keeps you on your seat craving for more and more and more.

Thunder Cheese is one of the simplest snacks you can imagine but like Dawn’s Old Fashioned’s, this cheese trickster uses magic in its combination of ingredients. Sharp Cheddar, Montery Jack, pecans, dash of mayonaise and a royal amount of red chili pepper flakes create heaven and kicks in like Thunder: Boom!

Thunder Cheese has a dubious history and is not easy to find. We keep its origins close to the city and belong to the group that believes its a true New Orleans recipe. Even though the recipe is online it is a tough one to find in stores around town. There is basically only one good supplier that keeps its secret pretty well hidden. Once you know it and taste it, you won’t share this source with everyone. I will also not do this here but am very happy to share some with you when back in New Orleans. Myths around its origin are conflicted. It might come from the first contacts between the Brits and the Tabasco family. More clear is the history of a few ingredients; the pecan from New Orleans / Louisiana, the red chilli pepper from the Tabasco farms, and the sharp cheddar from British cheddar that accidentally aged during the long trip from the UK to Avery Island. The more dubious ingredients are the Montery Jack cheese, which is already a mix between the spicy South and the cheesy Nnorth, and also the mayonaise (Spanish origins but the French made it the popular sauce) which basically is the basic lubricant in too many good dishes. Maybe the amount of mayo is where the magic of the taste and texture lies.
So if Thunder Cheese is born from the clash between different cultures, the lightning that comes with thunder could be the enlightened conversations that follow after eating this beloved and addictive snack.

thunder cheese

In the last months Thunder Cheese has proven to be the holy snack, that combined with misses Dawn’s Old Fashioned’s brings the best in all of us. It serves as the starter for wonderful conversations, heated discussions, artistic projects, juicy stories, pole dancing contests and sometimes even out of world experiences. Thunder Cheese is the true binder of exquisite tastes and our newly found god. We welcome our artists with Thunder Cheese and when the days are too sunny or too rainy, we bring a visit to our supplier to keep the campers calm and happy.

We thank you Thunder Cheese

The Colour Out Of Space

PARSE NOLA is proud to present The Colour Out Of Space curated by Deltaworkers (Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout). The exhibition includes three films and three events with international and local artists. The exhibition opens on Friday, October 16th with a presentation from 6 to 7:30pm, followed by a reception. Additional events will be held on October 23rd and November 13th (details below). The exhibition runs through November 21st and gallery hours throughout the exhibition are noon to 5pm on Fridays and Saturdays.

Still from Night Soil by Melanie Bonajo Still from Night Soil by Melanie Bonajo

Film works by Melanie Bonajo (The Netherlands), Pauline Boudry (Switzerland) & Renate Lorenz (Germany) and Terence Nance (U.S.) form the starting point of a rotating exhibition. The focus from one film to the next will shift throughout the exhibition, allowing each to shine and gain additional meaning through engagement with local artists and theorists, including Red Vaughan Tremmel, Ashley Teamer & Local Honey, Brad Benischek and Dave Greber amongst others.

For the exhibition, The Colour Out of Space, curators Gouwenberg and Lindhout focus on motifs like rituals and technology, gender politics, and Southern mythology. They find these themes of importance within the international art scene, but also vividly present within the cultural soil of New Orleans. The artists and theorists involved with the exhibition all work within the range of things unknown in the visible spectrum and they do so using colors. From out of space.

The Colour Out Of Space is a short story written by H.P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft in 1927. Drawing inspiration from a number of sources describing the extremely limited senses of humans, his aim was to create something entirely outside of the human experience: a truly alien entity. The story tells of the problems that arise after a meteorite crashes onto someone’s land. After its discovery the meteorite begins shrinking and local scientists are unable to discern its origins. As the stone shrinks, it leaves behind globules of color that are referred to “only by analogy” as they do not fall within the range of anything known in the visible spectrum.

PARSE is an art space and curatorial residency in New Orleans’ Central Business District that serves as a platform for critical dialog about contemporary art. This program hosts three to four visiting curators annually. During extended stays in the city, curators are encouraged to engage in studio visits with local artists, conduct research in the area, and utilize the PARSE facilities to experiment with the boundaries and possibilities of curatorial practice.

Schedule of events:
October 16 at 6pm:
Screening of Swimming In Your Skin Again by Terence Nance
Lecture on Southern Mythology by Deltaworkers (Maaike Gouwenberg & Joris Lindhout)
Zine by Brad Benischek

October 23 at 8pm:
Screening of Night Soil / Fake Paradise by Melanie Bonajo
Lecture / panel on ethnobotany, rituals and technology with Christopher Brown
Performance by Vanessa Centeno
Contribution by Dave Greber

November 13 at 8pm:
Screening of Opaque by Renate Lorentz & Pauline Boudry
Panel on gender politics by Red Vaughan Tremmel and Ashley Teamer
Performance by Local Honey & Ashley Teamer 

 

Supported by:

All three filmmakers in the exhibition have been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Thanks to May Gallery, Prospect and David Sullivan for lending us some equipment!

What the night brings & Sofia B. didn’t sleep well

Sunday October 11th at 7:30PM, Screening by Léa Triboulet, at Antenna Gallery.

Deltaworkers presents their second resident artist for its fall program 2015. Léa Triboulet (1987) studied scenography at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, where she started to make shorts films and received her masters degree with honours in 2010. In 2013 she joined the Film Factory, an international program lead by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr in Sarajevo.

She has a poetic and contemplative approach to cinema; a cinema of contrasts, silence, empty spaces, waiting and loneliness but also of hope, movements and contradictory feelings. In New Orleans she will specifically focus on mixing fiction with documentary whilst investigating how to deal with affection in a cinematic form.

At Antenna Gallery Triboulet will present two films and talk more about her research in New Orleans.

What the night brings, 20′ (Film Factory, Bosnia Herzegovina)
with Maja Izetbegovic, Bojan Dimitrijevic and Adnan Omerovic.

Ina’s everyday life is regulated by sessions of posing for her companion, a painter. They live together with his younger brother in an old apartment.

What the night brings 2

Sofia B. didn’t sleep well, 20′ (25 films, France)
with Koralie François-Schwartz, Mireille Perrier and Iljir Selimoski.

Sofia runs away from boarding school with the address of her grandmother in her pocket whom she does not know.

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Supported by:

PAULALIEN KNOWS BEST

Performance by Jacob Dwyer

Dwyer is Deltaworkers’ first resident artist in our fall program for 2015. Dwyer has a background in Fine Arts and experimental film. One of the positions he takes as an artist is that of the “outsider” and the subsequent possibilities of mobilization within the audience when engaging with this position. At Deltaworkers Dwyer will investigate the character Ignatius J Reilly of John Kennedy Toole’s famous New Orleans novel ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ alongside the methodologies used by illegal tour guides that show tourists around the many famed graveyards of New Orleans.

PAULALIEN KNOWS BEST

They Humiliate The Human

Sunday December 14th, 5pm
Deltaworkers headquarters, 641 Caffin Avenue
Free entrance and drinks

For the last event of the year Timmy van Zoelen presents the performance The Whale’s Ear (2014), and the teaser trailer for his new film They Humiliate The Human.

Whaling

Image: Whale Stranded at Berckhey, copper engraving by Jacob Matham after Hendrick Goltzius, 1598.

THE WHALE’S EAR
This multimedia performance is a speculative reading of an etching by Jacob Matham titled ‘Whale Stranded at Berckhey’.

The Whale’s Ear is supported by Tent. Rotterdam

THEY HUMILIATE THE HUMAN
In Van Zoelen’s upcoming film, which he is developing as a result of his research period in New Orleans, the male voice of the artist takes us through his existential account of time travel by way of slurping energy drinks. Eventually They Humiliate The Human will be the result of a series of sensual phantasies exploring the voluptuousness of time-travel through object-oriented power relations.

Other Odyssey

Friday 5 December at 7PM, Performance directed by Dafna Maimon
Address: Second Line Stages, Digital Cinema. 800 Richard Street
In collaboration with New Orleans Film Society
Tickets: Free

A video program presenting the new live video Other Odyssey and short film The She The Same by Dafna Maimon, accompanied by the teaser of Lindsay Lawson’s new feature film The Smiling Rock.

dafna zonsopgang

Other Odyssey is a live video by artist Dafna Maimon. Set in a cinema it rethinks the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey from the perspective of the matriarchal Bonobo primate, humans closest relative and the only being on the planet that practically eliminated violence from her society. Other Odyssey fantasises about returning to that moment depicted in the film when the early human apes realise that a bone could be used as a weapon and tool for oppression or dominance, and proposes an other use for it, a use more in line with the affective and sensual lifestyle of the Bonobo’s.

The She The Same (2014, 20 min.) is a part of a bigger homonymous project including a performance and artefacts, in which the experience of our “true other” is set parallel to phantom limb pain. By looking back at mythologies in which each human was once separated from his or her “other half” in the beginning of times, this “lost other” could be considered to be a phantom limb or body. This research project, developed with the help of a neuroscientist, explores the way in which we construct our own bodies and those of our lovers. Simultaneously the idea of a double body or our true other half is a convenient tool for the production of expectation, desire and the romantic industries such as the capitalist ventures that profit from societal construct of romance and love.

Dafna Maimon (FIN/IS, b.1982, lives in Berlin) works with film, video, and performance. Her work explores human drama and the construction of the self through invented autobiographical characters that battle with the configuration of individuality, alienation, the body, and the perception of reality. Her films showcase the economy of close personal ties as well as to materialise through them, placing value on the idea of community on a grassroots level. Equally central within Maimon’s practice is the research and employment of the constructs of cultural artefacts such as cinema, TV, theater and science.

Other Odyssey is supported by the Finnish arts promotion center TAIKE