Born in part of the COVID–19 pandemic, Indecent Spaces is a multi–channel performance art and media piece exploring connections between a location’s meaning, citizenship and identity in the evolving 21st–century American landscape. Though today’s climate may seem to some removed from patriotic origins and idyllic intent, the collaborators’ examination reveals forgotten voices and bodily impact ever present through our nation’s history — aspirations of a more perfect union, albeit a complex one.
Indecent Spaces features video montages of four national landmarks: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; a transcontinental railroad station in Livermore, California; the 6th Police Precinct Station House in New York City; and the Benedictine Monastery in Tucson, Arizona. For the exhibition’s world premiere at Auburn, The Jule commissioned an additional video examining Birmingham’s Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. Going forward, each time the exhibition is presented, new collaborators will introduce additional historic sites and movements.
Dancers activate the media pieces by manipulating large screens as the backdrop, with you, the viewer, as a part of the scene. These movements are invitations to address a place’s legacy, producing and breaking down divisions and navigating contested, yet layered, sites and personal spaces.
