AnthropoFest: Bring Whatcha Wanna!
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Uptown Campus
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Folklife Village, Sustainability Tent

AnthropoFest: Bring Whatcha Wanna!

Rebecca Snedeker and Denise Frazier

New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Tulane University 

AnthropoFest invites festival goers to bring an object at JazzFest and register it to generate a collection that reflects the material culture of Jazz Fest this year. Plastic straw, mango sorbet, sand from the racetrack, or sunscreen: come create this collection! Where did this stuff come from and how does it relate to the Anthropocene— or Age of Humankind? Join us in collecting and creating the 2022 JazzFest AnthropoFest Collection! 

Contribute an object:

  1.     Register (form & photo)
  2.     Display
  3.     Engage

Guidelines:  

  • Any object or material that has been brought to the fairgrounds, bought at jazzfest, or found on site is welcome.
  • Object donors can choose to leave their objects at the exhibit or keep them.
  • If object is fixed in place elsewhere on site (physical facilities, sound engineering infrastructure, etc.), donor can sketch a representation of the object on the object registration form and/or email a photo of the object to gulfsouth@tulane.edu.  
  • Donors are welcome to arrange, engage with, and respond to the objects.
  • Donors are encouraged to return to the space to see how things have evolved and where/how their object has migrated.

Visit the exhibit to see interventions by Special Guests, including an Artist, Anthropologist, Archaeologist, Biologist, Geologist, Historian, Musician, Poet, Philosopher, and more.

 

We are, arguably, in the Anthropocene, a newly proposed geological epoch in which human-generated forces have shifted planetary patterns and left a material signature on the surface of the earth. Though contested, this framework offers a deep timeline through which to consider the festival today, the gulf south region, and this region’s relationship to the planet. At the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, we welcome people to learn from our surroundings and relate the local to the planetary. All of our programming is based on the belief that the more we understand where we are, the more fully we can engage in our democracy and collective destiny. For JazzFest, this translates to an investigation of our material surroundings. Donors are invited to consider the Anthropocene through collecting and playing with various objects that animate the festival. Special guests will employ a wide variety of disciplines and conduct immersive site-specific activities with the found objects to explore the idea of Anthropocene at JazzFest. 

As curators, we hope guests leave with a sense of wonder about our material surroundings and a sense of care for one another and the earth. We consider this installation a playful time capsule of JazzFest 2022, Week 2, in the new Sustainability Tent, and a celebration of New Orleans creative expression, coastal expertise, and hospitality for which we are world-renowned and of which each guest is part of the continuously unfolding story.  

The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University is an interdisciplinary institute that supports the understanding of the gulf south region and its relationship to the world. We build upon and bridge the strengths of Tulane University and School of Liberal Arts, in which we are housed, and New Orleans and the Gulf South region. We are collaborative scholar-artists whose work addresses the beauty and complexities of this place. Assistant Director Denise Frazier, PhD, is a Latin Americanist, founder and member of Les Cenelles ensemble, and member of the performance company Goat in the Road. James H. Clark Executive Director Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker and the co-author of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas.

AnthropoFest was inspired by Benjamin Steininger’s “Bureau of Commodities” performance during the Commodity Flow seminar at the Anthropocene River Campus, which we co-organized and hosted in partnership Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) andMax Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (MPIWG) as the culmination of the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River" project. We wish to thank Benjamin Steininger and our colleagues and friends at HKW and MPIWG, as well as Kai Lumumba Barrow, Hope Bennett, Regina Cairns, Brian Edwards, Sean Fader, Beate Geissler, Kathleen Krauss, Doug Miller, Rachel Ornelas, Helen Regis, Shel Roumillat, Casey Ruble, Oliver Sann, and Thomas Turnbull.