Multi-Media Installation

Chalmatia: A Fictional Place Down the Road

Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans
June 15 – September 8, 2013

We never intended to create a whole world called “Chalmetia.” It just unfolded before our very eyes, and we captured it in photographs, text and moving images. In 2008, we came back to New Orleans and tried to arrange ourselves here. It was very difficult, and we ended up spending a good deal of time out in “The Parish” crashing at my sister’s. There are always a lot of kids and old people hanging around my sister’s house, so we started photographing them and telling stories with them. They became great collaborators in a rambling story with tens of characters and multiple timelines both fiction and real. This story then ended up in a physical space in the CAC where we made a physical story out of over 400 photographs, 85 text pieces and a feature-length film. With the various media laid out over three stories in the Contemporary Arts Center, the story could be entered at any point. Thousands of people entered our story world and were immediately transported back to childhood where magic ruled and brutality could be endured together.

“Chalmatia drops a translucent curtain between these characters’ world and ours, allowing us to share in the transformative power of cheap K-mart costumes and Nerf guns once again, but also preventing the embarrassment of voyeurism as we lean in over these people’s personal lives.”

Southern Glossary

“Chalmatia is magical. [It] is the place you imagined living as a child…Enter the story, where every adventure is possible, at any point in the narrative…No one will tell you it’s bedtime.”

NOLA Defender