Bvlbancha Liberation Radio is an Indigenous-led multimedia channel on Native identity in the Gulf South. Led by Lady J and Koni Achafa, Bvlbancha Liberation Radio hosts a weekly radio show on Tuesday afternoons from 4:00pm-8:00pm at bvlbancharadio.net. Their show supports community activities that educate people on Gulf South Indigenous contemporary realities; environmental activism, and the impacts of climate change on south Louisiana, current events important to Indian country, and culture. They have incorporated education around historical earthwork architecture, southeastern Indigenous language-learning, mutual aid, community-led communications technology, and stickball learning as part of their community work that extends beyond playing Indigenous music and conversations with Indigenous scholars and artists on their weekly show. 

This gathering continues New Orleans Center for the Gulf South’s multi-year AnthropoSonic series, which features artists who collaborate with non-human entities, to engage and bridge the public and Tulane communities, and explore the research question: How can we hear the planetary? We consider this year’s theme, remote sensing, as defined as the technology of acquiring information from an object or phenomenon without making physical contact. Radio uses “remote sensing” as an application that allows it to communicate through electromagnetic radio waves. AnthropoSonic: Remote Sensing extends the concept of artists working with non-human collaborators to focus more directly on the concepts of Indigeneity and ritual and the art form of aurality, as examined through the writing of Professor of Music Dr. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, and sensing. 

This event is possible through the support  of Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, Mondo Bizarro, the builders of Nanih Bvlbancha, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the Dorothy Beckemeyer Skau Art and Music Fund, the Gulf South Open School (an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project), Lambent Foundation, FootPrint Project, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and Prospect New Orleans’ Artists of Public Memory Commission. 

 
Special thank you to Bayou Rosa, Friends of Lafitte Greenway, NORD, and the City of New Orleans.

For more information, please visit: www.nanihbvlbancha.net and www.prospectneworleans.com.

Follow us on Instagram: @nanihbvlbancha, @prospectnola, @nolagulf

We invite you to join us in tending to this special place in the months and years to come! Our mound was built on the Lafitte Greenway between January and March 2024 with community members actively involved in the build process - hauling soil, clay, oyster shells, bagasse, and driftwood to the site, shoveling and stomping to compress the earthen materials into a mound shape. Intertribal community members embedded prayers, gifts, offerings, dances, and even a Houma language dictionary into its layers. 

We wove palmetto mats for erosion control, and drew “love letters'' to the mound, using paints made of native plant, clay and ochre pigments! We envision Nanih Bvlbancha as a neutral ground where we honor our Ancestors and yours, their stories and your stories as well, their unbelievable ingenuity and the ingenuity in each of us! We’ve gathered soils from along the Mississippi watershed, from all across this continent, and from other continents. We added those gifts of soil into our mound to honor the distant lands of many cultures and many peoples who call Bvlbancha | New Orleans home. We honor the powerful life force that is the Mississippi River, as she carries silt from other places to form the precious land we stand on, the nutrient rich soil that grows our food, and the water that nourishes the many beings of this place. 

Our Nanih calls attention to the lands and other mounds we are losing in South Louisiana, and the urgent need to protect coastal and tribal communities, marking the four directions, calling us into a balanced way of being, recognizing that the health of our world, and ourselves, depends on that balance. We welcome these teachings in these precarious times. Nanih Bvlbancha reclaims a place for Indigenous peoples in the heart of Bvlbancha and honors, not only our ancestral histories, but also, our contemporary realities. It anchors us in relationship, reciprocity, respect for all beings, and inspires opportunities to gather as a  culturally diverse community, educate in traditional ways that involve active participation, care and tend in more sustainable ways for our native plants, play ancient Southeastern ball games, and more! We invite you to be a part of Nanih Bvlbancha.

The Nanih Bvlbancha is a modern earthwork built and stewarded by an intertribal collective of artists, activists, and educators who all have roots in the Indigenous southeast. Nanih Bvlbancha is one of three curated projects of Prospect New Orleans’ Artists of Public Memory commission.

Artists of Public Memory is a new public art commission that invites Louisiana artists to share their visions of how monuments and collective memories can appear and function in our landscape, society, and public space. This initiative marks the first time Prospect has invited Louisiana-based curators and cultural organizations to nominate artists for a public art commission. Distinct from Prospect.6, which is scheduled to open in Fall 2024, Artists of Public Memory represents a key part of Prospect’s commitment to having a broader presence in New Orleans that extends beyond the parameters of the triennial exhibition.

Prospect New Orleans was conceived in the tradition of international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo to showcase practices from around the world in settings throughout the city with an emphasis on site-specificity. The Prospect exhibition is a citywide contemporary art triennial, formalized in 2008 and now looking ahead to its sixth iteration, curated by Miranda Lash & Ebony G. Patterson and running November 2, 2024 –February 2, 2025.