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Jazz pianist Vijay Iyer - “Mendi + Keith Obadike, Four Electric Ghosts: An Opera-Masquerade (Mmanwu)”

We have a new remix of our song If the Heaven Don't Hear (for Marian Anderson) remixed by Gordon Voidwell.

http://[blacknetart.com]

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read the original press release

MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE LAUNCH BIG HOUSE / DISCLOSURE
a 200-hour long house song with the voices of Chicago-area Citizens

WHEN: March 1st- 8th
WHERE: Northwestern Univ. Campus – Kresge Hall and online at
http://blacknetart.com/BigHouse.html
CONTACTS: office@blacknetart.com (blacknetart.com) &
w-leopold@northwestern.edu, 847-491-4890 (Northwestern Office of
University Relations)

Mendi + Keith Obadike (born 1973, USA) make interdisciplinary art works using live art, music, literature, and new media. One of their better-known projects is Blackness for Sale, in which they auctioned Keith's blackness on eBay. Mendi + Keith were commissioned by Northwestern University's Art Theory and Practice Department to create a new work, Big House / Disclosure, an intermedia suite featuring a 200-hour long house song that will be heard in real-time from March 1st-8th in Kresge Hall on Northwestern's campus and online at http://www.blacknetart.com/Bighouse.html. This work was created in honor of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British Slave trade in 1807 and Chicago's role as the first city in the United States to adopt a Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance in 2002, requiring businesses seeking city contracts to disclose whether they have profited from slavery.

Big House / Disclosure was constructed using audio interviews conducted by Northwestern University students with Chicago-area citizens about slavery and the city's slavery era ordinance. Mixing these interviews with elements of Chicago house music, the artists created a multi-channel sound installation. The project includes 200 video clips of live art and musical performances viewable from the website http://blacknetart.com/BigHouse.html. Musical events in the sound installation are triggered by custom-designed software tracking the real-time rise and fall stock prices of several corporations that have admitted to profiting from slavery.

Keith Obadike received a BA in Visual Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. Mendi Obadike received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. They have received a Rockefeller New Media Art Fellowship and commissions from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitechapel Gallery of London, Electronic Arts Intermix, and The New York African Film Festival. Their Internet opera, The Sour Thunder, was commissioned by Yale University, broadcast in its' entirety in (104.5 fm) Berlin, and released by Bridge Records in 2004. In 2005 they launched Four Electric Ghosts, an opera produced by Toni Morrison's Atelier at Princeton University, and in 2006 they performed a live sound art transmission from the Amory Art Show in New York commissioned by the Franklin Furnace. Big House / Disclosure has been generously supported by a Pick-Laudati Award from Northwestern University.

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/02/slavery.html/2007/02/slavery.html
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Doing research for a new project Keith and I are working on. Reading a lot of interesting books on slavery. I'll say more about that when the time comes, but in the meantime, I'm sitting with what I'm finding out as I'm making my work. In the stacks, I stumbled upon a book I wasn't looking for; it's called We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and it was edited by Dorothy Sterling. I opened to a random page and what I read hit me hard. A mother and daughter who had been separated due to slavery for twenty years had reconnected and started writing to one another. The daughter was free and was hoping to buy freedom for her mother and brother. The mother, Elizabeth Ramsey, writes to her daughter:

I said in my letter to you that Col. Horton would let you have me for 1000 dol. or a woman that could fill my place. I think you could get one cheaper where you are than to pay him the money. . . . I think that 1000 dollars is too much for me. You must writ very kind to Col Horton and try to Get me for less money. I think you can change his Price by writing Kindly to him.

What hit me was learning what comes along with the knowledge that one is property. I had never thought about the fact that my ancestors must have been knowledgeable about things like how much a person goes for in Texas, versus Ohio. Or how much they were each worth, individually, in a dollar amount, such that a dollar amount such as $1000 could be exorbitant. (Did they often assess one another that way, thinking of dollar amounts when they noticed each other's physical qualities?) Or the way suggesting that another person come be a slave in one's place could be discussed as a matter of fact if one were writing one's free daughter and hoping to meet one's own grandchildren. It was the matter of fact way that she thought through what it would take. Of course, of course, but it opened up a whole world of sorrow for me to read that letter. How are we still dealing with this kind of knowledge today? What is the after-image?

For the record, the daughter was able to buy her mother for $900.