Mendi + Keith Obadike's "SlowDrag" Procession
Date: Saturday, April 15, 2023
Time: 2PM
Location: St. Louis Place Park
Details:
Experience Mendi + Keith Obadike’s SlowDrag, a sound installation consisting of cars moving through the St. Louis Place neighborhood playing numerous simultaneous remixes of a song (an interpolation of “Black Angel Blues”) created by the artists.
This invigorating performance was curated by Allison Glenn and realized in part in collaboration with Muhammad “Mvstermind” Austin, as well as with numerous St. Louis hip-hop producers.
Departing from St. Louis Place Park, the procession will last approximately one hour.
Mendi + Keith Obadike are creators of music, art, and literature. Their collaborative practice exists at the intersection of sonic, visual, and literary traditions, often highlighting the resonant histories embedded within the three forms. Through the creation of site-responsive works such as immersive installations and sonic sculptures, the duo considers the effect of time and environment on the body. Their work has been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New School in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and more. They have received numerous awards, including a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award.
More about SlowDrag:
Rooted in associations of the intimate slow-drag dance form that has persisted from the early blues through to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, SlowDrag starts with a song by the artists that is then reinterpreted and remixed. Contained within the work is a condensed musical history that speaks to its place of performance. Slow drags carry resonance in St. Louis through their popularization by Scott Joplin in his early “rags,” or piano pieces, carrying the name and onward into one of the few filmed portrayals of the dance by Bessie Smith and her partner toward the end of the short film St. Louis Blues (1929). Through a collaboration with music contractor and event producer Mvstermind, this history is carried forward by St. Louis hip-hop producers and brought from its space of intimacy into new relations with public space.
