Location : New Orleans, Louisiana

Client: The people of New Orleans

Year : 2014 - 2018

Status: Completed

Collaborators:  Antenna, National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), Junebug Productions, HousingNOLA, Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC), Ole & Nu Style Fellas Social Aid and Pleasure Club, RAO Real Estate Advisory, Justice and Beyond Coalition, Crescent City Community Land Trust (CCCLT), Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, May Gallery & Residency, NEXT City, New Orleans Master Crafts Guild, Hidden History Tours, and Loyola Law School Human Rights Clinic.

Blights Out is a collective of artists, activists, and architects who seek to demystify and democratize the system of housing development and expose the policies that lead to gentrification. We located the lynchpin of gentrification in laws governing property, debt, and racialized wealth stratification. Between 2014 and 2018, our mission was to generate dialogue, art, and action that could challenge inequitable development and drive land use policy in New Orleans. We are currently in a period of hibernation and reflection.

Process

The Living Glossary

The Living Glossary offers expanded, personalized definitions of the sterile vocabulary of housing development,demystifying terms and concepts such as: "auction", "blight", "community", "development", "gentrification", "property". Moving through and beyond legal or "official" definitions, the glossary will detail the historic origins of the terms, the socio-political contexts that activate the words, and oral histories from individuals whose lives have been affected by the concepts, bringing a living fullness to deceptively simple words that frame our lives but whose shallow definitions flatten our ability to understand and work against oppressive realities.

Blights Out for Mayor

Blights Out for Mayor calls for and suggests entry points into a post-Katrina Truth and Reconciliation process. We seek the redress of policies and values imposed in the wake of disaster that reinforce ecological apartheid in our housing landscape and that threaten to turn our city into a gentrified fortress that shelters the wealthiest from the rising-up of seas and people.

Home Court Crawl

In December 2014, Blights Out activated Home Court Crawl (HCC) with a porch crawl/ roving performance in collaboration with Junebug Productions, Kesha McKey, and Frederick “Hollywood” Delahoussaye. Hollywood and McKey “performed architecture” by engaging in a call-and-response with blighted homes, reading the architecture as text, riffing on the absurd state of the hollow structures, and energizing them with folly, rage, spirit, and joy.

Blights Out for President

Blights Out for President is a creative campaign that calls for an alternative to top-down electoral politics that center talking heads and vague political jargon over the voices and concerns of everyday people. The Blights Out for President election signage campaign hijacks the aesthetics of election propaganda to create a crowd-sourced campaign of yard signs and billboards calling for housing justice.