Transcript

Trigger: House of Ladosha

Hi, my name is Christopher Udemezue, also known as Neon Christina of the House of Ladosha.

I’m here representing House of Ladosha celebrating our 10 year anniversary with the New Museum. We have pieces throughout the museum and one of them is this wall installation. It is essentially a look into House of Ladosha’s history, where we are, what we are about, the medium of language we use, and how language is an art form. The wall installation is a narrative look into the play of language that we use as a house and the use of language as an art form. House of Ladosha is infamous for using and re-appropriating culture, pop culture, music and hip hop culture and you can see that in this text piece. The text piece is cryptic, kind of confusing, narrative and has many parts to it. Working with Juliana Huxtable Ladosha and myself we created this beautiful, visual piece for you to decipher and look into try to figure out what the hell is going on. Ladosha isn’t actually making paintings or drawings but making culture, making music, making words, making things that are not every day expected from an art collective, which is what we want to celebrate here on this wall and all the other pieces throughout the museum.

House of Ladosha, although we call ourselves a house and we all share a name like Ladosha or Labeisha, we are not an appropriate house of ball culture. What is ball culture? Ball culture is a whole subculture and world in the queer community that stated in NYC around competing, dance competitions, drag competitions, and creating families outside the constructs of blood-related people. Like ball culture and like house culture we’ve created a house for ourselves and named ourselves House of Ladosha. Inspired and obsessed with ball culture and all the house that are still making that culture thrive, we’ve also been confused often with being an actual house and competing in balls. We often get hit up to do balls or do things where people are trying to look into vogue culture, so we always find it funny when we have to correct people or clarify that yes we are a house but it’s a play with using the house name House of Ladosha.