Laura Wellen
Mud & Blue
Mud & Blue takes the physicality of post-Hurricane Harvey Houston as a starting point to consider the murky, muddy ambiguity of emotional life and affective politics as lived within artistic community. In a series of five pop-up events, Mud & Blue combines spoken word narrative essay and poetry with video screenings by contemporary artists engaging questions of landscape, politics, and affect. Mud & Blue looks to earth and the color blue as suggestive materials for considering what life in a post-disaster city might entail. It suggests a political weariness, mitigated by shared efforts at healing or cleanup, at recovery through notions of community. Simultaneously, it allows for the problematics of such notions of community and recovery ̶ the muddiness of the proposition of a city-wide cleanup effort ̶ in its interrogation of bad feelings, exhaustion, sadness, and apathy ̶ that is, the feelings that are the impetus for the blues.