Brooklyn-based collaborators, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere’s project will harness the musical talents of the residents of New Orleans Musicians’ Village—a 2006 housing initiative in the 9th Ward which provided financial assistance to bring musicians back to New Orleans after the catastrophic devastation left by Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches.
A Slow Dropping will be a dispersed musical score, roving from house to house, then sonically assembling in a centralized physical location and an FM broadcast. The musical score will be generated as a site-specific work, where the source of each sound is located in the area of its production. Each musician’s home will become a musical track and personal story coalescing into a unified score, simultaneously fragmented and cohesive, echoing both the social organization of neighborhoods and the mechanics of a recording studio’s mixing board, where individual sound tracks combine to form a field of sonic assembly. A solo exhibition featuring this new project will be presented at the UNO St. Claude Gallery from August 1 through 30 , 2020, and is produced and curated by Anna Mecugni, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Orleans.
(Excerpt and image above selected from grant proposal. Artwork is copyright of the artists. Touching from a Distance, installation view, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, 2016, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Photo by Constance Mensh.)