Notes on the Emptying of a City | Intervention Lecture Series

Ashley Hunt to speak Wed., Oct. 26

Ashley Hunt's Notes on the Emptying of a City is a performance that acts as a dismantled film, where a live narrator pieces together the sounds, images, and storytelling of a documentary before a live audience. 

After Hurricane Katrina, Ashley Hunt joined a number of organizations in New Orleans to help document what had happened at the Orleans Parish Prison during and after the flood, producing a short documentary that became a centerpiece to a campaign seeking amnesty for people arrested during the storm. Working from the intimate starting point of what it meant to be present in that time and space with a camera and microphone, and arriving at concerns of the politics of being an artist, the performance leads viewers through difficult questions of race, visibility, and speech, the writing of history, and how the total political crisis of Katrina continues to speak to the state of our political lives.

His performance will be 5:30 p.m. Oct. 26 in 62 Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign.

Hunt's visit is part of the School of Art + Design's Intervention Lecture series, which has been funded through the Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artist Fund, the College of Fine and Applied Arts, the Krannert Art Museum, and the School of Art + Design Visitors Fund.