LANDS – Portrait of the City of Houston is a performance and film installation developed by French artists Jocelyn Cottencin and Emmanuelle Huynh. LANDS examines the past and present of Houston and its growth toward becoming the 4th largest city in the United States and invites audiences to reimagine the city’s possible future. The evening will feature a series of outdoor performances that Cottencin and Huynh choreographed with their Houston-based collaborators Ayla Davis, Anthony Almendárez, Liyen Chong, Roger Moore, Isabella Mireles, and Henry G. Sanchez, who will then guide the audience from the outdoors into the MATCH theater to experience the film installation.
LANDS expands on ideas of plurality, and the connections or disconnections between personal and cultural memory and local history, braiding together a unique chronology of the city that is part documentary, part poetic narrative, and part futuristic re-imaging of the local geography. The artists invite the audience to ponder how we begin telling a new story about an ever-evolving city.