Visiting artist offers a different view of Katrina

   The room was hot and the air was stale. The number of people in the room was double what would have been a comfortable amount. A low murmur went hand-in-hand with the faint smell of sweat that grew stronger by the minute. A girl lay crying loudly on the floor, trying to convince herself out loud that everything would be alright. The people in the room seemed less than confident.
    This was not the sight someone would expect at GCSU on a Thursday night, at least not this early on a Thursday night. The location of this scene would seemingly be reserved for a refugee camp, much like the one the Superdome became after Hurricane Katrina struck, but was actually a converted room in the Wooten-Garner House just across from the Old Governor’s Mansion.
    The whimpering woman had replaced two much more vocal and direct women, who were clad in trash bags. The women asked for help and even went as far as to shouting at the crowd, “Why am I invisible to you?!” The realism of the performance and the atmosphere had some people second-guessing their convictions. One spectator even said that “watching it was uncomfortable,” a sentiment likely shared by many others.
    The presentation had begun with the anxious and curious crowd filing into three rooms which had been converted into one.
    In the center of the room was a light installment that projected several different colors to all the different murals and pieces around the room. To the immediate right was a painting on the wall of numerous hands encompassed in flames reaching toward the ceiling. To the left was a painting of a face the size of the wall outlined in skulls.
    On the back wall was an outline of a house painted with pictures of destruction caused by Katrina inside and next to that was a woman staring dazed and aimlessly into a television made of air filters and cigarette butts with a few pictures of destruction scattered about it.
    Into what would have been the next room is where all the action took place. Just around the face outlined in skulls was the painting of a blue female figure with flowing hair standing up out of water and garbage holding a box containing the word “HOPE.” Still more paintings depicted people several feet below the top of the waves, looking up, as in desperation. As the people slowly made their way around the room, a violinist in the front played “America, the Beautiful” softly, even questioningly.
    Further to the right was an entire wall painted in red, which read at the top, “Open Letter to FEMA and the Bush team.” Only through the observation of nearly every bit of wall space did the motivation of the piece Jose Torres Tama named “The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina” becomes clear. The destructive nature of Hurricane Katrina was only topped by the negligence of the government that was supposed to protect the city and people of New Orleans.
    “I offer this performance experience as one of many perspectives on the storm from a survivor,” Tama said in his program. “It is my hope that this creative response can be used as a clarion call to question a government that has a disturbing habit of lying to its people.”
    Many of the people at the performance shared Tama’s sentiments. With the crayons that were made available people had written on the wall such things as “where’s my government?” and “does your incompetence know no bound?” One spectator summed up his or her frustrations simply by writing the word “ignorance.” The wall was not the only open criticism to the federal government.
    “New Orleans is having trouble surviving all the odious lies,” Tama said.
    But despite the serious connotations to death and destruction during the evening, Tama was not afraid amuse his audience by making fun of himself and others.
   “I got out of New Orleans in a stolen school bus,” Tama said in the introduction to his performance. “Please step forward and smell the evacuee,” Tama said looking up and holding his hands out. With this, the crowd offered a loud, if not nervous, laugh.
    The performance offered an insightful and original perspective to the catastrophe that happened in New Orleans two years ago. Tama was able to convey a feeling of bitterness and optimism all at the same time. The standing-room-only crowd got a first hand look at just what the people of New Orleans went through and how they viewed the actions—or lack thereof—of the government they depended on.
    “I was at Bobcat Village when it happened,” said Matt Dumiak, a senior Economics major. “The response time was unforgivable, if I was there, but I wasn’t knee deep in water. The installation seemed right on.”
The effectiveness of the performance one Tama called an “installation-based live-action” piece, hinged on the production of the students that worked on it.
    “I am grateful for everything, especially the students, who created some very imaginative and daring art,” Tama said in closing.
    His feelings were shared by the students and faculty that worked on the piece with him.
    “He’s amazing and so passionate about his stuff,” said Taryn Giles, a junior art major. “Everyone really got into it after hearing him tell about his plans.”
   Giles had created the piece called “Filtration.” She was the dazed girl staring watching TV made of different kind of filters.
    “The piece is supposed to convey the message of how the media filters out the most important stuff.”
And that was the ultimate goal of Tama in his presentation as he presented his complete view of the events of Katrina without filtering anything out, whether the viewer liked it or not.  

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 28 2007. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry