Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Play Me Home

Production | Acquisition Grant

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s Play Me Home is a four-channel film and video piece and a series of related, sculptural objects. This new work blends narrative fiction and nonfiction centered around several intertwined threads. One channel features a filmic portrait of the four o’clock flower, a variety of trumpet flower known for its ability to propagate and thrive on land hostile to most plant life. The four o’clock grows wild throughout the Delta region, on the same lands where the artist’s family settled as some of the earliest Black sharecroppers in the Delta, and where they still own and maintain farmland. This view onto historical Black relationships to land, property, and livelihood in the region is the focus of the work’s second nonfiction channel. The final channel presents scenes from a non-linear fiction following an elderly Black woman’s return to New Orleans, where she once played in an all-female brass band, as she comes to the end of her life. The work’s title references Black musical funerary traditions, as well as honoring lesser-acknowledged sites and modalities of “home” for Black people living in the U.S. By exploring localized migration in the U.S. South, Play Me Home documents and interrogates place, personhood, and vitality as encountered through the sensual experience of Black people and communities.