AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs’ Invocation of the Queer Spirits invokes historical queer and marginalized practices as a way to heal the past, critique the present, and project a more creative future.

Founded in 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, New Orleans has always held a special place in America's cultural imagination. As a major trading port, a strategic military location, and a cotton boomtown, the city has always been a cultural and geographic nodal point and meeting place, originally for Indian tribes and trappers, later as a portal to the north and to Europe. Interestingly, for much of its history New Orleans was a monosexual city: the only significant female presence were sex workers in its early life. The city is also a key spiritual portal. It is celebrated for mysterious voodoo rites held on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and as a home of such luminaries as Queen Marie Leveau and Doctor John. It is this prevalent sense of the city being haunted—prime real estate for the supernatural—that makes New Orleans an ideal site for this project.

Invocation of the Queer Spirits will at once “christen” the latest rebirth of New Orleans as a cultural capital while evoking the spirits of the marginalized populations that have played a formative role in shaping New Orleans's culture. The event marks the site as a place of future creativity, while infusing it with a sense of the city's ghostly past. In addition to the ritual invoking the spirits, the artists will make a vow concerning their lives (and creative lives in particular) for the coming year.

The invocation itself will be a closed ritual in a secret place beginning at dusk on Halloween night.

Listen to AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs talk about Invocation of the Queer Spirits:


Click here to read an interview with Anne Pasternak and AA Bronson.


Photos: Chrysanne Stathacos.