Sarrah Danziger in collaboration with Melanie Hoff and Phillip R. Cunningham (Copy)

Sarrah Danziger in collaboration with Melanie Hoff and Phillip R. Cunningham

Listen to New Orleans 

Harold aka Ursulines Burgundy on Mardi Gras day, 2020. Photo by Sarrah Danziger

Listen to New Orleans is a psychogeographic oral histories installation, book, and website about a changing city. Using physical signs embedded throughout New Orleans indicating phone numbers to call, listeners can dial in to hear oral histories from long-term residents of New Orleans about a place at which they stand that no longer exists, and what was lost as a result. The book component will document and preserve these histories in a format that can be taken home, and allow these histories to live on indefinitely.

Listen to New Orleans will launch with nine stories that explore how the deep history of New Orleans’ past is shaping its present. The first nine storytellers featured will be Jude Acers, Jeffery Darensbourg, Judge Edwin Lombard, Hasan "Ha Sizzle" Matthews, Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Frank Perez, Harold Short II, Akilah Toney, and Stacey (Robinson) Towns.

Listen to New Orleans was conceived by Sarrah Danziger, who has been documenting New Orleans community members for 10 years, as both a photographer and videographer. Through working on many diverse creative projects, she has been drawn to finding new, interactive ways to share stories and images that are long-form, transformative, accessible, and collaborative. Danziger photographed the storytellers, and recorded and edited their interviews.

Melanie Hoff is a social software artist and educator whose work re-codes conventions of norms and interfaces through software, installation, and new choreographies of exchange. Hoff created the website for Listen to New Orleans.

Phillip Cunningham is a reference assistant and cataloger with the Amistad Research Center whose research is focused on New Orleans local history, Kansas African-American history, and Digital Humanities. Cunningham is the archival researcher for Listen to New Orleans