The Float Lab

Monique Verdin is a citizen and former councilwoman of south Louisiana’s United Houma Nation and is a part of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative core leadership circle of brown (indigenous, latinx and desi) women. She has intimately documented the complex interconnectedness of environment, economics, culture, climate and change in southeast Louisiana, for decades. Her indigenous Houma relatives and their lifeways at the ends of the bayous, in the heart of America’s Mississippi River Delta, has been the primary focus of her storytelling practice. She is the subject/co-writer/co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love. Her interdisciplinary work has been included in an assortment of environmentally inspired projects, including Cry You One as well as the publication Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Monique is also the director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange

Nick Slie is a New Orleans-born performer, producer and cultural organizer whose family has been living in Southeast Louisiana for eight generations. He is the Artistic Director of Mondo Bizarro. Since 2002, Nick has developed a wide array of imaginative projects that have toured to art centers, universities and outdoor locations in 38 states across the country and abroad. But he is most proud of the work he does at home, in New Orleans, where the land kisses the water. Nick’s creative endeavors range from interdisciplinary solo performances to large-scale community festivals, from innovative digital storytelling projects to site-responsive productions. From 2004-2008, he served on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS and is the former board chair for the Network of Ensemble Theaters. He currently serves on the boards for Goat in the Road and The North American Cultural Laboratory. Nick recently directed Clear Creek Creative's Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man and is developing his latest project Invisible Rivers.

Jeff Becker is a designer, director and sculptor who specializes in audience interactive performances and outdoor spectacles. His work focuses on issues surrounding racism, abuse of power and environmental justice. He has toured extensively nationally and abroad and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants. Jeff is the co-founder of Catapult, a performance laboratory in New Orleans dedicated to the development of original theater and innovative design.

Invisible Rivers is a project of The Land Memory Bank and Mondo Bizarro that uses music, theater, visual art and boat-building to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, environmental racism and displacement. We are physically modeling ideas about how we can learn to live with fluctuation, to live with uncertainty, and to live in symbiosis with our increasingly watery world.

Our indigenous ancestors in Louisiana created floating adaptations for generations, living as they did along the powerful and capricious river that is the unfettered Mississippi. These floating boat/barge/home/villages demonstrate a flexible relationship between land and water that has been disregarded and overengineered in the past century. Working with her family of indigenous Houma Nation boat builders who work as welders in South Louisiana’s oil fields, Monique Verdin has already researched and developed the Float Lab, which will travel by land and water to communities that host Invisible Rivers events. This 15’ by 8 ½’ pontoon platform boat is outfitted with adjustable walls that - when extended - become a 26’ by 23’ stage and a display area for exhibitions. The Float Lab is one centerpiece of the Invisible Rivers project, and it is designed and built as a blank canvas to allow for various types of experimentation related to how we can live on water. Part field station for community engagement, part performance venue, the Float Lab will serve as an activation site to bring our ancestral, cultural and physical knowledge of the wild, free-flowing past into the present.