Interview with Ashley Hunt
By Alex Villar

Ashley Hunt’s work spans several fields, enmeshing elements of theory, activism and filmmaking to articulate his perception of pressing questions in the contemporary world. In ‘Corrections,’ his most extended project, Ashley makes use of a theoretical toolbox including the Foucaultian analysis of the punishment apparatus as a technique of subjectification and the Agambian positing of the concentration camp as the paradigmatic example of biopolitical power. Such articulations have clear implications for his prison subject matter. They also situate his project beyond the immediate scope of interest in prison related issues toward a more encompassing problematization of the question of social segregation. In the following interview, Ashley talks primarily, but not solely, about his ‘I Won’t Drown’ video, which was shot in New Orleans after Katrina. The video pertains to a series on incarceration issues.

Video stills from "I Won't Drow

Alex: Could you describe ‘I Won’t Drown,’ its basic premises, logistics and how it fits within your work as a whole?

Ashley: “I Won’t Drown” began simply as an invitation to witness part of the post-Katrina context in New Orleans. I was asked to join a delegation that included Critical Resistance, Human Rights Watch, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the local organization, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), and we were assembled to investigate and speak publicly to the situation of the Orleans Parish Prison.
In the lead up to the hurricane and flood, Sheriff Marlin Gusman refused to evacuate this vast jail’s nearly 8,000 prisoners — the majority of whom were merely awaiting trial — which as a result, left an unknown number of prisoners to drown in their cells. Our delegation was asked to respond to accounts that were emerging from grassroots media and the work of a few local lawyers, in the context of the Sheriff’s absolute denials and, predictably, the corporate media’s ignoring of it.
While this was an important story on its own (and this gets to how this project fits within my work as a whole), it was also a flash point, an intensification of many other relationships, politics and narratives that find themselves crystallized into the institution of the prison and its practices. In this way, through addressing the issue of this particular prison, the work also looks outward, tracing a circular movement back and forth, where things in the world find their way into the prison and what the prison does finds its way back out into the world. It is this movement, this looping of economic, political and cultural flows in and out of the prison that much of my work has sought to narrate, wherein the prison and criminalization aren’t metaphors for larger social conditions, but are instead points on a map of those conditions, conditions that prisons help to constitute rather than ameliorate.
“I Won’t Drown” was my first response to this circumstance, a video that responded to the urgency of the moment and which could be distributed rapidly along grassroots networks. It is made in a documentary mode interwoven with essayist elements, and it takes the story of the jail’s deadly evacuation as its starting point. But rather than focus on this as an isolated tragedy, the video moves out circularly to its larger context: the devaluation of human life as it proceeded through the racial tropes of criminality and pathology; which together were projected onto survivors of color, “managed” by hysterical police violence and irrational detentions, and explained through the narrative of “looting.”
As we all know, with the exception of some critical and complicated reflections on race in the initial days of Hurricane Katrina media coverage, corporate journalism helped to construct — rather than deconstruct — the state’s general criminalization of survivors of color by adopting the rhetorical figure of “looting.” This is not to suggest that looting didn’t take place, nor to judge whether looting was justified or not (this would be a trap); it is to insist that the idea of looting was used creatively and politically. The idea of looting offered a narration for the state’s response to the storm wherein disparate qualities of response were distributed to separate communities. This narrative instituted a schema that separated trapped citizens into categories of: survivors/innocent and looters/guilty (which is the structure of the aforementioned trap). The characterization of certain people and their survival activities as “looting” not only maligned those survivors, it also cast a judgment upon them, initiating a state response based upon control rather than rescue, including: patrol, capture and arrest, prosecution, internment and punishment, and in some documented cases, extra-judicial killing. The figure of “looting” was effective to this end because it already corresponds to the racialized perceptions of communities of color by the state, the media and its larger publics. As they are predisposed to perceive communities of color as criminal and threatening, physical separation and visible markers of control are therefore key to a cultural sense of safety and order, both in physical and psychical terms, as they reassure a racial safety. In my essay, “A Fortification of Race” (Re-Thinking Marxism, 2006) I speculate that it was in part the breakdown of these mechanisms of control and a perceived dissolution of racial and class order that induced the irrational violence of the state, which acted against people who were, in more ways than one, “out of (their proper) place.” And in the case of the Orleans Parish Prison, imprisoned people were suddenly out of place simply by the nature of that place having changed. And in this case, people were not only left to drown but were never mourned publicly, nor were their lives were ever calculated among the tragic losses of the storm and the malfeasant management of its aftermath.
Other parts of this project have so far included a video built of instances of political speech spoken by survivors during a weekend of “right to return” events, and two essays: the one mentioned above, which analyzes the larger racial character of the state’s response by drawing on Foucault’s notion of “madness,” Agamben’s connection of “the camp” to the state of exception, and psychological accounts of race; the other reflecting upon my own time in New Orleans after the storm, looking reflexively at my own presence — as a witness with a camera seeking to construct a narrative and document instances of testimony and speech (published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, ‘07 as “Notes on the Emptying of a City“).

Video still from "I Won't Drown"

Alex: Your choice to center ‘I Won’t Drown’ on the form of the press conference brings to mind Butler’s dispute with Bourdieu over the potentiality for the performative utterance to succeed in producing an effect of authority where there is no recourse to prior authorization. Is the misappropriation of dominant forms of address for resistant resignification a recurrent device in  your work? Could you offer some examples?

Ashley: I think Bourdieu’s criticism of performativity is largely correct on the register of public speech that he responds to it, but I also think it misses the multi-dimensionality of performativity that Butler theorizes. The point of a performative utterance is not necessarily to assume in total the narrative authority of power, nor to resignify something in such a way that symbolic relations of power automatically shift. Simply, it means an utterance that performs an action. This action can also be the unsettling of authority in much more subtle and accumulative ways — putting chinks in the rhetorical armor of authority, contradicting and destabilizing its truth claims and axioms, and allowing new semblances of truth, identity, desire and modes of political and social being to emerge, as well as producing new ways of relating and forming community.
On the level of public speech, especially as it meets psychic development, this can account for how people who are not already vested with authority — whose speech is rendered “inaudible” to power or who have been socialized to believe that they are not worthy or capable of it — come to rehearse authority, try it on and perform it, and then embody it through language, even if ironically or mockingly at first. If one has ever worked within community organizing or with young people in relation to public speaking, art, leadership training or critical thinking, you might have seen this actually at work, as it allows the social actors involved to have a picture of themselves in an authoritative position, as an agent; and once you can picture it you can also imagine it; and once you can imagine it, you can also begin to exercise it, to expect it, and find ways to insist upon it’s being recognized. And rather than privileging the register of mainstream public discourse as an exclusive space for recognition, James C. Scott offers us another model of thinking about such utterances, one that doesn’t privilege the ear of power when evaluating the effect of speech, but instead, privileges the discourse of communities of the subordinated or the dominated (a “hidden transcript”).
Speech on these levels has for a long time been a concern of my work, and in my work around the prison it has meant engaging the narratives of people targeted by the prison system as they form what Clyde Woods calls “systems of explanation,” along with the speech of individuals who work within the system and assemble its ideology. My 2001 video, “Corrections,” is structured around the active accounting for today’s growth of the prison system, including the language of grassroots or “organic” intellectuals who come from the communities targeted by criminalization and imprisonment, to the racial rhetoric of the “tough-on-crime” political movement and the free market rhetoric of prison builders, privatizers and other profiteers. These speaking subjects are framed intentionally by documentary conventions that signal degrees of expertise, transferring to the grassroots intellectuals not only the chance to speak their personal expertise, but also shifting the symbolic conventions that would typically subordinate their authority. As this project then developed into the larger “Corrections Documentary Project,” these subsequent works became focused more directly on the speech and discourse of people directly impacted by the prison system, as they work to analyze, articulate and speak their circumstances so that they can take better control over them. In these ways, my work has functioned as a witness to this development and a relay between pockets of development in different places.
In “I Won’t Drown,” the form of a press conference that our delegation chose as a scene of address offered an image of authority occupied by people who are often not recognized as authority to the media. This was made clear later that day by the lack of news coverage that followed. The news cameras that can be seen in the video’s primary shot (its scene of narration) are indeed those of the local and cable networks looking for stories in post-Katrina New Orleans, but within a half an hour, all those same news producers went two blocks over to interview Sheriff Gusman, who dismissed the speakers as “crazy,” saying it didn’t happen; and that was the account that counted. The stories from the press conference were transmitted as little more than B-Roll footage to the Sheriff’s speech, and the status of some 8,000 human beings would not register as “news.” But rather than consider this a failure, I saw “I Won’t Drown” as a way to sidestep the media, and as a record of that story it has been seen by many more people than would have been watching that particular evening’s news, passed along grassroots distribution and screening networks, in art contexts and on cable TV. Within that, it is key that the story’s narration is delivered from the podium of a press conference, appropriating the syntax of authoritative speech and assuming the risks of speaking out publicly.

Video still from "I Won't Drown"

Alex: One of the most poignant moments in the video is given by the sight of a horizontal line stained directly on the surface of house facades located in the most vulnerable areas of New Orleans. Other lines can be inferred from that initial one: for instance the dense migration lines created by populations fleeing from the flood, followed by the segmented lines tentatively formed by the scattered groups that managed to return to their dwellings. Do you see the possibility of a line of flight or the gentrification outlines that Harvey so eloquently articulated mark the definite rearrangement of living spaces in the city?

Ashley: This line is one of the most important parts of the video for me. On one hand, it is an index of the storm, of the failure of the levees and the relative vulnerabilities and security of low versus high ground and their historical relationships to the racial and class-based shape of the city. On the other hand, this stain is architectural, a kind of horizon line violently displaced, guiding one’s vision along discordant perspectives in formal terms, but also in terms of its social content, which accounts for how the line operates in the video.
As to whether this line can be taken up and signified with a different kind of imagination, one of possibility or agency for example, this might mean first understanding how it marks a trauma, and by trauma of course I don’t mean only something tragic and difficult, but also something forgotten, repressed and not faced; something that therefore cannot be grieved and can only be accessed through the melancholia that results. Aside from the obvious question of deaths and lost people and homes that the line appears to memorialize, it also marks the public repression of what was political in the storm and the state’s response, as well as the pressures to participate in that repression, either by keeping quiet or by actively forgetting.
As to what repression the line marks politically, we know it marks an emptying, a deterritorialization of people and their claims and definitions of the spaces of the city. This has an economic quality, tracing the removal of these people and meanings which were a “drag” on economic values, as defined by people who live outside these communities — for whom the poorest communities and their territitorializations had for years been in the way of the capitalist accumulation, as it is typically confused as progress. In this sense, the storm performed the function of gentrification, a mode of what Harvey’s calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Of course, here it didn’t take rigging real estate markets and manipulating property values to push people out; it was a series of actions which — due to the storm — appeared coincidental, poising economic forces to capitalize, to accumulate through the dispossession of these communities’ obstinate claims, neighborhoods, homes and housing projects.
Of course, what did not differ from a typical gentrification process were the state territorializations — the police intimidation, criminalization and violence — that also characterize gentrification, which accompany the logic of removal, and here, as I’ve outlined already, was wielded with even less restraint or regard for the value of human life. In this way, gentrification should not be seen only in economic terms, but also as a form of social and spatial redistribution that is already violence.
In this way, the line not only memorializes the fact of segregation and geographies of racial and class hierarchy, but also points to their repression from public discourse; and it could be useful to ask where we see the melancholia that results from these repressions. What does that look like or feel like? What can it point us to that we might not yet have language for? It might offer a path of possibility or a line of flight away from immobilizing mourning and toward a state of active grieving, which in political terms would mean finally dealing with Katrina as a political history from which political change should result. Certainly, Katrina and its aftermath held within it all the necessarily energies and sparks to coalesce broad-based political movement, even of a revolutionary nature, and just as certainly, this clues us into further reasons for the radical state violence that was deployed (meaning it was also a counter-insurgency mission). Certainly we see these resistant energies in the thousands of people who’ve returned to the city despite the barriers of distance and locally erected obstacles, who have themselves found wells of strength and conviction to demand their rights, to rebuild their houses and their communities. But in a larger political sense, this could also mean uniting and organizing such energies to uncover the kernels of radicality that lie repressed in the markers of the storm, some of which we might see already in the growing political organizing now happening in the South.

Left and Right, video stills from "An Interview with Curtis Muhammad" (2005)

Alex: In the recent English publication of Gerauld Raunig’s book Art and Revolution, he posits the necessity of articulating the art-activist nexus as a transversal task, purged from the equivalence of these historically polarized terms. Your work seems to transit rather fluidly between the art and activist fields. Should we consider this nomadic mobility the result of an accidental transit between practices? Or, are to understand them, similarly to Raunig, as components of a transversal practice?

Ashley: I think it is already “everybody’s business,” as you put it. As I alluded to earlier, we are all connected to prisons in very real ways. As with war, it is the taxes we pay that build, operate and service prisons, and it is always in our name that other people are apprehended, whether we know it or not. More importantly, prisons, jails and policing help structure the very real distribution of bodies, space and power in our society, such that no place within society does not have a relation to them. And symbolically, the prison helps to structure our sense of order, safety and control in ways that are deeply connected to histories of race, class and political exclusion, which play greatly into our identifications with and against those with whom we live.
So yes, one task is to “break the shell of particularity” that would allow a person to think prisons have nothing to do with them; and “making it everybody’s business” would mean to re-situate viewers so that the space they perceive as insulating them from the prison can be reconsidered as a political distance, a function of a privilege offered historically to specific groups of people and not to others. This is to distinguish between the disciplinary ideology of prisons and policing on one hand and their actual function on the other: the ideology of prisons being that prisons are the “civilized punishment” of a democratic society, punishing by suspending one’s political liberties according to measurements of time (a “truth effect” that helps constitute our received sense of political freedom); while the function of prisons can be seen — on symbolic levels and on the individualizing levels of subjectivation — as maintaining a partition in society, a partition between those who are truly considered a part of society and those who are its guests, trespassers or “parasites”; between those who are allowed to “partake in ruling,” as Ranciére puts it, and those who are to be excluded from that possibility; between those who are valued as fully “human” in relation to inclusion, rights and the protection of law and those who are valued not as human but in terms of economy — as labor, as force, as technology, or, stripped of such utility (as in the case of the labor surpluses of post-industrial economy, especially as was exemplified during Hurricane Katrina), regarded as liability, risk, expense, or as refuse, dregs or vermin.
But the task is not only to speak to these things, but to look at how people experience them, how they perceive them, speak of them, rely upon them, how they analyze and think about them, whether they feel they can do anything about them and what that might look like.

Video stills from "I Won't Drown" and "Corrections" (2001)

Alex: Throughout the years, you have devoted a good amount of attention to the prison subject matter. You have probed its economic interdependencies, situated its discursive and political conditions of possibility, and finally posited it as the generalized norm of a bio centric power. Is the task at hand to break the shell of particularity that characterizes the perception of the prison in the collective imaginary and make it ‘everybody’s business,’ so to speak?

Ashley: It’s not accidental at all. I’ve always considered it important for my work to be able to move across the boundaries of disciplines, spaces of reception and audience. The differing languages, logics, conventions and perceptions that such boundaries delimit not only reflect their specialization, they are also products of the same histories that separate them out in the first place and give them their identity, often corresponding to the same questions of race, class, identity, power and access that we’ve been talking about here. Furthermore, each represents some limitation of imagination, defined not only by what they allow but by what they exclude. Therefore, it is an important political challenge to summon formal languages, cultural perceptions and tropes of representation in such a way that they can move across these boundaries — not by becoming as generic and homogenized as possible, as with much mass culture, but through contradiction and disagreement, rubbing limitations together so that they might give away to something not yet allowed by any of them.
Similarly, I see the field of art and the field of activism to be just that: two different fields of discourse and meaning that correspond largely to different institutional histories, demands, languages and political economies. Why we should valorize one over the other or order them into hierarchies of value (art versus politics) makes no sense to me. I am interested in them as regimes of explanation and intelligibility; I am interested in where they overlap, in what tools one offers the other, where they both fail, and what they are symptomatic of. I find value and possibility in working across them, using what each offers and polluting their disciplinary specificity, but with an interdisciplinary purpose: not to inhabit both at the same time, but to work through them toward a new object.
And this is where I could see characterizing my work as transversal, as its trajectory belongs to neither art nor activism per se, but to a pursuit of ideas that cuts across them, intersects with their methods or inquiries, touching down in one field or the other (or in others for that matter) to have a home, to have an effect, but never to become solely an object of that discipline. The point is to stick to the trajectory of an idea, its line of questioning and its conceptual development, which will most likely mean betraying these disciplines once they demand the work conform to their own discursive or institutional demands. To me, being an artist means valuing one’s ability to function as an artist — to intervene in the sensibility of the world as it is organized perceptually and discursively — and not to seek only the recognition of art institutions. Similarly, this is how I understand activism, and is where I see the boundary between the two begin to disintegrate, which is not a problem, for me it is actually the point.

About Ashley Hunt
In addition to producing The Corrections Documentary Project, Hunt works as a visual artist, teacher and writer, primarily engaging social movements, modes of learning and public understandings of political life. Among his interests are structures and systems that allow people to accumulate power and those which keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know of themselves and how they respond to such structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as intertwined, drawing upon the ideas of organizing, theories of culture and ways people occupy the world — the theorizing and practices of each informing the other.

This has included investigations into the prison, the demise of welfare state institutions, war and disaster capitalism, documentary practices, movement disciplines and political activism. Much of this work is organized under the umbrella of The Corrections Documentary Project, which centers around the contemporary growth of prisons and their foundational role in today’s economic restructuring and the politics of race.

Hunt works in collaboration with dance artist, Taisha Paggett, and with artists, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne, whose collaborative work, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War” exhibited at Documenta 12 and recently, at the Tate Modern. His work has been also screened and exhibited at the 3rd Bucharest Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, as well as numerous grassroots and community based venues throughout the U.S. His writings have been published in Rethinking Marxism (’06), the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (’07 & ‘05), Sandbox Magazine (’02) and at Artwurl.org (’03–’06). He is currently a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Click here for an online portfolio of Hunt’s work: www.ashleyhuntwork.net