is a performance that acts as a dismantled film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience. Exploring the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera and microphone in the months following the storm, it recounts Hunt’s engagement with community activists while researching the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison, raising themes of architecture, cameras and visibility, and the powers of speech, silence, art and journalism in a moment of crisis. Set up as a slide lecture, a narrator sits at a desk before an audience, with papers and a laptop computer connected to a projector. Between meditations on his own experience he cues testimonies — videos of a citizen, a neighbor, an organizer and others — each one drawn from the archive of material compiled during his visits. The artist’s narration, still images and videos weave together as a live montage that offers a larger testimony on disaster, race, law, speech and witnessing at a time when the urgency of Katrina's crisis seems to have receded into a comfortable past.

click here for project website: www.notesontheemptyingofacity.info