Opening for Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?

Join Project Row Houses for the opening of Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?

Artists Strada and Keren use this incomplete participatory installation to ask visitors to engage critically with the U.S. Constitution and pose two questions: What 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would you propose? And: Do you think it is possible to amend an unequal system?

The artists note that the U.S Constitution, which opens with the phrase ‘We the People,’ was written in 1787 by and for wealthy white male property owners, and that to date, only 27 amendments have been ratified to change the document. Their questions illuminate this legacy and ask for a collective response interrogating the Constitution’s embedded issues of structural racism, settler-colonial violence, heteropatriarchy, reproductive injustice, labor inequities, and non-human animal and climate neglect.

Central to the installation are sonic soapbox sculptures that build upon the history of the soapbox as a site of collective struggle, while also emphasizing listening, mutuality, and access. These objects emit an in-progress oral archive of responses to the project’s questions.

Community members are invited, during the opening and throughout the installation’s run, to step up onto the soapboxes, listen to the archival recordings, and add their responses, which will be collected and added to the project’s oral archive to be shared in future iterations of the work.