112 - 09|09|09

SCAD - Savannah College of Arts and Design
Music/Arts – Performance
Friday, September 25, 2009
4:00pm - 6:00pm
From Boundary Hall to Pei Ling Chan Gallery
324 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Savannah, GA

NO LAB on TOUR explores the growing mobility of peoples and cultures, especially with the recent case of New Orleans, Louisiana. In October 2008, curator Dan Cameron launched the first U.S. Biennial, Prospect.1, in New Orleans, with the intention of bringing further attention to a city that was slowly recovering, three years after Hurricane Katrina. One significant reason for the setup of an international exhibition in a post-disaster context was to put New Orleans back on the map, and with it to promote a living culture and values specific to the Southern United States. In the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, our installation proposed a carnival cart surrounded by a set of drawings with scenarios of the damaged districts; while inside the cart, a virtual Lower Ninth Ward in “Second Life,” as opposed to “real life,” offered the visitors a video and new interactive perspectives with which to explore the area.
One year later, NO LAB on TOUR extends the original project in a series of exhibitions curated by Laurie Ann Farrell and commissioned by the Savannah College of Art and Design. With “on TOUR,” the intention is to bring some fragments of the culture of New Orleans to various parts of the U.S., starting in the South, in Georgia, where many refugees have relocated themselves. Savannah and New Orleans share many historical and present-day similarities: a port of entry on the East Coast serving the slave trade, a landscape of marshes and plantations, neo-classical architecture and tremendous celebratory parades. Yet major elements of the local culture of New Orleans have slowly disappeared and cannot be found anymore, for example the “second line”, a tradition in brass band parades in New Orleans in which nonmembers of a “Social Aid & Pleasure Club” (the “main line,” that has the permit to parade) can join in the festivities.
On occasion of the inauguration of NO LAB on TOUR, we would like to experiment with the possibility of creating an event in “Second Life” that can later be reproduced and performed in “Real Life.” Cao Fei's RMB CITY project including the NO LAB platform will be the site to meet, rehearse and set up a first procession. This procession will be then transferred to Savannah, starting from Pei Ling Chan Gallery and touring around the city.

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