Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System? is a participatory installation by artist collaborators Alex Strada and Tali Keren. It critically examines the U.S. Constitution and creates space for intervention and political imagination.
The artists 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?
They 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 to become part of the installation by stepping up onto the soapboxes, listening to the archival recordings, and adding their responses, which will be collected and added to the project’s oral archive to be shared in future iterations of the work.
The work was initially commissioned by the Queens Museum and site-specific iterations, and it was then traveled to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Aldrich Contemporary in CT.
The installation will open September 27th and will be on view through January 26th, concluding a week after the January Inauguration in Washington, D.C. PRH and the artists are interested in expanding the project’s reach so that diverse audiences around Houston can add their voices to the project’s oral archive. Prairie View A&M Univerisity Architecture Department, content creation lab, has generously partnered with PRH to build the soap boxes.