| Our backgrounds are in poetry, music, and theater, and we generally think of our work as a kind of opera, whether it’s presented in a theater, gallery, or online. Recently, however, we’ve been thinking a lot about architecture, especially the relationships between physical structures, social institutions, and social power. This recent interest in architecture has led to meditations on architectural elements such as load bearing walls, which support the upper part of a structure but are not always obvious to the untrained eye. Removing or altering a load-bearing wall can be revealing at best; at worst, it can spell disaster for the larger structure. With this in mind, we’ve been asking ourselves what kinds of foundational structures are invisibly holding up the weight of our culture. | 
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Mendi and Keith Obadike
Mendi and Keith Obadike, Four Electric Ghosts, 2005. Production, currently in progress. Courtesy of the artists.Our backgrounds are in poetry, music, and theater, and we generally think of our work as a kind of opera, whether it’s presented in a theater, gallery, or online. Recently, however, we’ve been thinking a lot about architecture, especially the relationships between physical structures, social institutions, and social power. This recent interest in architecture has led to meditations on architectural elements such as load bearing walls, which support the upper part of a structure but are not always obvious to the untrained eye. Removing or altering a load-bearing wall can be revealing at best; at worst, it can spell disaster for the larger structure. With this in mind, we’ve been asking ourselves what kinds of foundational structures are invisibly holding up the weight of our culture.
In 2006, we were commissioned by Northwestern University to create a new work, Big House Disclosure that would be featured at a 2007 conference on slavery and the visual imagination. The conference, coordinated in conjunction with the Institute of Jamaica, would commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. After doing some research, we discovered that in 2002 Chicago became the first city in the United States to pass a “slavery-era disclosure ordinance.” This ordinance requires all businesses seeking city contracts to disclose any historical profiting from the slave trade. No action would be taken against the confessors, but their participation in the slave trade would become a matter of public record. Those who chose to hide ties to the slave trade would lose their contracts.
Another important influence behind the work was Chicago house music, a home-grown-turned-international phenomenon born from the descendants of the migrant black population that moved from the South to the Midwest. It is widely held that the name “house music” came from the Warehouse nightclub. For us, the music invoked Chicago’s vibrant black population and modern industrial labor spaces. We asked approximately 40 students at the university to conduct and record a total of 200 interviews with area citizens. Our questions asked for respondents’ opinions about the ordinance, their knowledge about house music, information about how they or their ancestors came to this country, and their opinion about who held responsibility for the lasting effects of slavery. We took the audio from these interviews and incorporated them into a real-time, software-controlled 200 hour house song / sound installation in the University’s Art History building, which was streamed live on the internet. We also produced a series of text and graphic scores that was performed by students and featured on the project website. As a contemporary equivalent to the 18th century Wedgwood-designed abolitionist cameo, we created a downloadable ring tone that auralized the ideas behind the “anti-slavery medallion.”
In addition to the tensions we built within the piece, the work also depended upon the ways the performers approached the scores and upon the variety of perspectives our respondents brought to our questions. The different nodes of this project allowed us to explore the invisible ways that slavery functioned as a foundation for contemporary American notions of responsibility.
