SLIPPAGE/Moogfest 2018 Performance: “…these borders that keep me down…”
“…these borders that keep me down…”
von der Heyden Theater
Rubenstein Arts Center, 2020 Campus Drive
Friday and Saturday, May 18 and 19, at 3 p.m.
What are the resonances from redlining and political gerrymandering? How are neighborhoods designated to separate people? When did the Federal Government actually engage in unfair lending practices in order to keep African Americans out of quality neighborhoods and away from the best resources available to other Americans?
SLIPPAGE presents an exploration of redlining, gerrymandering, and asocial cartographies that produce and reinforce inequality. Deploying custom-designed live-feed sonification interfaces, wearable technologies, and AfroFuturist performance practices, this hour-long afrotechnopunk extravaganza brings DUKE faculty, graduate students, community activists, and SLIPPAGE artists together for a special presentation.
The performance is a part of Moogfest 2018, but is free and open to the public at 3pm on Friday, May 18, and 3pm on Saturday, May 19, in the von der Heyden Theater at the Rubenstein Arts Center, 2020 Campus Drive in Durham, N.C. Buses will be available, leaving West Parrish Street next to the 21c Museum Hotel at 2:30 p.m. and 2:45 p.m., and returning at 4 p.m. and 4:15 p.m.
This work has been in process for several years, said SLIPPAGE director Thomas F. DeFrantz, but is just finding its first realization in 2018. SLIPPAGE began thinking about redlining as a practice in various cities, and wondering at the ways in which the Bull City had been defined by the HOLC (Home Owner’s Loan Corporation). This participatory performance intends to allow attendees to reflect on the ways that asymmetry has been produced by intentional inequalities based in prejudices and racisms of the twentieth century.
“Now, more than ever, we understand how mapping has produced unfair effects for people seeking municipal services and support across the United States,” DeFrantz said. “This work explores, in a poetic way, the effect of living in segregated contexts of economic possibility and voting rights.”
The work explores the uncomfortable similarities of unfair bank lending of the New Deal Administration in the 1930s and current battles to gerrymander districts to be eternally controlled by one political party or another.
SLIPPAGE affiliates for the project include collaborating artists JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell, Martin Brooke, Denver Carlstrom, James Clotfelter, Kristin Clotfelter, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Summer Dunsmore, Quran Karriem, Matthew Kenney, Tessa Nunn, Rebecca Uliasz, Leah Wilks, and Brittany Williams.
