Presencing: New Media of the American South

Curatorial Statement

The 2013 McNeill Street Pumping Station New Music Festival (MSPSNMF) will unfold October 11th and 12th in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA at various venues in downtown and on Cross Bayou. In this iteration of the MSPSNMF, we are keen to turn an eye closer to home. In 2011 we cast a fairly wide net. We hosted people and works from every corner of the world. This year we will explore the shape and size of the Southern constellation of artists working on the fringes of their communities. We have our sights set on communities like Birmingham, Alabama; Greensboro, North Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana. These and several others are points in the psycho-geography of outsider art that we are excited to connect with Shreveport. In the spirit of Willoughby Sharp’s 1969 exhibition “Place and Process” in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Lucy Lippard’s book The Lure of the Local and Kenneth Frampton’s essay Towards a Critical Regionalism our work seeks to examine the relational and non-relational aspects of our place and its other. What is the connective tissue, for example, between Shreveport and Reidsville, North Carolina? What does it look and sound like when translated via the mediums of music and video? What does not translate and as such forms the ground for a learning moment between artists and musicians from these places?

McNeill Street Pumping Station:

Photos by minicine?