Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Montez Press Radio present Marronage; Meaning Wild—a long form radio program—on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, broadcast from New York City from 12pm-4pm ET (11am-3pm CT).
Marronage: Meaning Wild began as a community study of the conceptual and literal construction of wetlands as sites of refuge and resistance—and homes to histories (and possible futures) of cross-cultural care. Small convenings explored the liminal, conventionally inhospitable landscapes – and the pathways, foodways, and formations of kinship they engender. Out of this sensitive environment, an intimate community grew to include a broader network of friends and collaborators, including partners at Montez Press Radio, who joined Rivers Institute for a gathering in New Orleans in November 2024. We understand this broadcast as a partial audio index of places and people in the marshlands of Louisiana and other mirroring environments, where indigeneity becomes an expression of responsibility to the land and its physical and cultural porosity.
To listen in, visit Montez Press Radio’s website.
Marronage; Meaning Wild is a program in multiple registers—community conversations, non-public research, in-person and remote talks and programs, a retreat in New Orleans, a radio broadcast, community re-grants, and unfolding publications—all made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Participants Featured (in order of appearance):
[0:00:00-04:12]
Andrea Andersson reads an excerpt from the essay “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee, first published in The New Yorker, February 23, 1987. Andersson serves as founding director and curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought. Working with artists at the borders of art and archives, figure and ground, text and textile, she commits to a study of the indefinite field of art writing.
[0:04:30-0:20:14]
Nathan Smith/Ozone 504 offers an on-site introduction to the history and process of building Nanih Bvlbancha and his work with Bvlbancha Liberation Radio. Recorded live in New Orleans on November 13, 2024. Smith is an East Tennessee Melungeon (Saponi, Monocan, and Lenni Lenape descent), who found himself magically transported to Bvlbancha through a trick of fate at the end of the 20th century. He resides in the 9th Ward. He is a social practice artist, producer/engineer of Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, and arts editor and design director of Bulbancha is Still a Place zine, among other liberatory plots.
[0:20:45-0:24:00]
Utē Petit introduces her familial history and the journey to rematriate and steward her great-grandmother’s and three neighbor’s plots of land in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward stolen by the state of Louisiana. Recorded live in New Orleans on November 14, 2024. Petit is a New Orleans-based artist whose work explores Black-Indigenous land-based traditions and the creation of ‘Ailanthaland,’ a free Black nation of heavenly beings conceptualized using charcoal and graphite drawings, quilts, installations, farming, and cooking. Utē’s ancestry as a quilter, educator, and farmer informs her work, as does her upbringing on farms across the globe. Through her work, Utē seeks to represent a nation divested from white-imposed societal constructs and committed to the self-determination of all beings. She was the winner of the third annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2022) and recipient of the Marsha P. Johnson Starlight Fellowship (2023).
[0:24:05-1:05:20]
Cassie Watson Francillon performs a musical blessing and sound bath on Utē Petit’s ancestral land in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Recorded live in New Orleans on November 14, 2024. Francillon is a visionary harpist, exploring folk, jazz, classical, modern, & experimental music on the harp. Cassie composes, teaches, and has served on the board of the New Orleans Chapter of the American Harp Society and was the Assistant Producer of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Pop Harp Weekend from 2018-2019. She is a producer of the Sirens in the Twilight Music series and was the principal harpist in 2019 new age opera, The Coronation, which debuted at the New Orleans Airlift Music Box Village. Her solo album Luna Nuda was released in 2019.
[1:05:10-1:23:00]
Imani Jacqueline Brown converses with Manda Shutler of Montez Press Radio in London on the significance of Hurricane Katrina on her activism and artistic inquiries. Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, based in London. Her work investigates the ‘continuum of extractivism’, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. Imani’s work has been exhibited in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the United Arab Emirates. Recent exhibitions include StrikeGulf, a solo exhibition at Storefront for Art & Architecture (2024), and group exhibitions at UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences (2024), the Carnegie Museum of Art (2023), and the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022).
[1:23:20-1:35:40]
Frank Perez speaks on queer and indigenous histories of New Orleans. Recorded live in New Orleans on November 13, 2024. Perez is a historian, writer, editor, public speaker, teacher, activist, tour guide, Carnival krewe captain, wedding officiant, Tarot card reader, and French Quarter aficionado. Frank the co-founder and current Executive Director of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, dedicated to preserving local queer history. He has authored several books on New Orleans history, including In Exile (with Jeffrey Palmquist), Treasures of the Vieux Carre, and Southern Decadence in New Orleans (with Howard P. Smith), and is also the co-editor of the anthology My Gay New Orleans: 28 Personal Reminiscences on LGBT+ Life in New Orleans. In 2012, Frank developed an interactive walking tour of the French Quarter focusing on New Orleans’ rich LGBT+ history.
[1:35:42-2:01:40]
Ryan C. Clarke dj’s and performs an intimate set at the Marigny Opera House in New Orleans. Recorded live on November 13, 2024. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of the Mississippi. His work in the field of expanded earth science proposes counter-architectures of sociality based on the deltaic processes that built the land his home resides on. His writings and lectures have been published by E-flux, Rhizome, Terraforma, Harvard, and Dweller Electronics where he is a co-editor.
[2:02:12-2:20:15]
Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Ph.D., shares a personal narrative of the complicated admixtures of indigeneity, belonging, and the experience of living between categorization. Darensbourg is a writer, public speaker, researcher, zinemaker, provocateur, and a member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas. He is the founder and Editor-Who’s-not-a-Chief of Bulbancha Is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans. He was a writer-in-residence at Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods and a Monroe Fellow of New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane and is working on a book length study of the Atakapa-Ishak of Southwest Louisiana.
[2:20:20-2:40:00]
Emmy Catedral shares a sonic collage honoring the histories and forms of the first Pilipino settlement in Louisiana, St. Malo. Catedral is a Butuan-born artist and curator participating in collaborative acts of trans-tropical librarianship, archive activation, distribution, and acentering the ways of knowing imposed and sustained by the global north. She has shown work under institutional personas The Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca, The Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees, and as herself. Her multi-part installations, walks, performances, and artists books have been presented at Queens Museum, The New York Historical Society, LaMama Experimental Theater Club, among other sites without names. Emmy DJs as Pers Lab and is co-librarian of the mobile Pilipinx American Library. She is based in New York City, where she is the Director of Bookstore at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances.
[2:40:20-2:46:20]
Dr. Michael Menor Salgarolo shares an embodied meditation on the marshlands inhabited and fished by Pilipino migrants to St. Malo and the community’s traces elsewhere. Salgarolo is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and studies the intersections of race, migration, and empire in Asian American history. His research has been published in the Journal of Southern History and has been supported by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, and the A/P/A Institute at New York University. Dr. Salgarolo contributed a chapter on the Filipino settlement at St. Malo, Louisiana to Hidden Voices: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, a curriculum guide for the New York City Department of Education, and runs Blood and Water, an immersive walking tour that retells the stories of Brooklyn’s early Filipino communities.
[2:46:20-2:53:10]
Quintron shares his track “Dusky Gopher’s Revenge” from the album Ephemeral Ponds. This track, “DUSKY GOPHER’S REVENGE,” was created using a new instrument called “The Wildlife Organ,” built by Quintron in summer of 2023 at A Studio in the Woods in Louisiana. The work uses four high quality condenser microphones, housed in protective tubes and located at different elevations in the remote woods and swamps. Each of the four microphones were dialed in to capture different wildlife sounds – tree frogs, mockingbirds, carpenter bees, feral hogs, gators, nutria, even the occasional person or pet dog. These sounds were then “musicalized” with custom built circuitry and used as inspiration for more homemade synth music which was layered over the nature sounds at the Spellcaster Lodge recording studio in New Orleans. This track (and the entire album, “Ephemeral Ponds”) envisions the inevitable take-back of our planet by the creatures after our own chaotic self-destruction. Once endemic to the Gulf Coastal Plain, the Dusky Gopher Frog is now one of the rarest frogs in the world. The female of this species lays her eggs in ponds that emerge after heavy rains. Such ponds are called “ephemeral ponds” because of their ever-shifting liminal nature, appearing and disappearing throughout the year. The disappearance of this frog is a result of rapid deforestation and new construction in its habitat. Quintron has been inventing electronic gadgets and creating genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years, much of it in collaboration with artist / puppeteer Panacea Theriac aka “Miss Pussycat”. In 1999, Quintron helped to foster a DIY analog synth revival with a patented instrument called the DRUM BUDDY, a light activated analog drum machine which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns. These experiments eventually led to Quintron’s focus on a weather-controlled drone synthesizer called Weather Warlock and a website devoted to streaming its music called Weather For The Blind.
[2:53:30-2:57:35]
John DePriest, Ph.D., performs an improvisational banjo piece live at the Rivers Residence in New Orleans on November 13, 2024. DePriest is a musician and songwriter and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He is also an Instructor in the English for Academic and Professional Purposes Program through the Center for Global Education at Tulane University, where he has taught since 2016. His areas of focus include applied linguistics for ESL, phonetics of spoken English, language in the brain, spoken language performance, and language/music interactions. He is also the past president of Louisiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
[2:58:00-3:04:00]
Monique Verdin performs “Rivers Story,” an excerpt from Invisible Rivers, a composition produced by the Land Memory Bank and Mondo Bizarro Productions, featuring Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes’ song “San Malo,” and sound design and composition by Peter J. Bowling. Verdin is a transdisciplinary artist and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, Director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, and is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of Indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network’s Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager.
[3:05:00-3:22:12]
John DePriest, Ph.D., performs a live set of his own songs and compositions at the Rivers Residence in New Orleans on November 13, 2024. DePriest is a musician and songwriter and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He is also an Instructor in the English for Academic and Professional Purposes Program through the Center for Global Education at Tulane University, where he has taught since 2016. His areas of focus include applied linguistics for ESL, phonetics of spoken English, language in the brain, spoken language performance, and language/music interactions. He is also the past president of Louisiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
[3:22:15-3:42:00]
Cooking Sections gives voice to the migration histories of water buffalo in Turkish wetlands. Recorded and shared with Rivers and Montez Press Radio in December 2024. Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections deploys food as both a lens and a tool to expose landscapes of exploitation, ecological breakdown, and the metabolic inequalities underpinning global food systems. Since 2015, they run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolize climate breakdown. The recording is developed through the research conducted as part of Water Buffalo Commons, CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA.
[3:42:00-4:13:35]
Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes speaks about the ecological treasures and variety of the Louisiana wetlands. Recorded live at the Barataria Preserve at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve on November 14, 2024. Barnes is a musician, writer, naturalist, park ranger, ethnographic photographer, and actor. Barnes is the Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, one the oldest Afro-Creole carnival groups in the United States, which began its traditions in 1819, a member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and the band leader of Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots. Sunpie is a former National Park Service Ranger, former high school biology teacher, former college football All-American, and former NFL football player for the Kansas City Chiefs.