Big House / Disclosure
Big House/Disclosure is a multimedia project exploring the legacy of slavery, the genesis of house music, and Chicago's role as the first U.S. city to adopt a Slavery-Era Disclosure Ordinance (which requires companies doing business with the city to reveal if they profited from slavery in the past).
2007 / Mendi and Keith Obadike / Northwestern University, USA
Big House/Disclosure is a multimedia project exploring the legacy of slavery, the genesis of house music, and Chicago's role as the first U.S. city to adopt a Slavery-Era Disclosure Ordinance (which requires companies doing business with the city to reveal if they profited from slavery in the past).
Producers Mendi and Keith Obadike developed Big House/Disclosure in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave-trade. They collected interviews with 200 Chicago-area citizens and interwove those interviews with a 200-hour-long house song, which they composed using custom-designed software that tracked the rise and fall of the stock prices of several corporations who've admitted to profiting from slavery.
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Mendi + Keith Obadike tell stories with sound. They've webcast their opera The Sour Thunder (Bridge Records), won an award for outstanding sound design from the Connecticut Critic's Circle for work at the Yale Repertory Theater, released a book of poetry entitled Armor and Flesh, and received commissions from the Whitney Museum, the Whitechapel Gallery of London, and EAI /The NY African Film Festival.