IMAGE NATION: A Tour

by Jenna Horton in collaboration with Kurt Chiang
Sept 29-Oct 9, 2022

A former tour guide gets stuck in an installation from 1982, or 1892, or...? Linear time warps. Shards of a monument scatter, revealing soup cans, a canister of Quaker Oats, a replica of Penn's Treaty in an 8-bit video game console. Dads pose with pens. An armadillo says, "Welcome to Welcome Park, installed inside you since 1982, or 1892, or...?" and scurries down a rabbit hole. The guide trips, and follows. We will not walk anywhere but in circles.

IMAGE NATION: A Tour is a site-specific, autobiographical solo show that wrestles with William Penn as anchoring figure in Philadelphia’s origin story and iconography. The participatory performance, loosely given in the form of a guided tour, charts a non-linear relationship between the exterior landscape of “Welcome Park” and my internal, subjective landscape. Built in 1982 to celebrate Philadelphia’s Tricentennial, this public plaza acknowledges specific histories (the Slate Roof house) and excludes others (the Wampum Lot, former use by The Keystone Telephone Company, and others).

This project emerged from my experience working in Philadelphia’s tourism industry for nearly a decade. The performance actively wrestles with my role—as White woman, a descendant of colonists, and tour guide—in reinforcing, routinizing, and packaging history, and invites the audience to consider their own complicity or resistance. Using strategies of addition and juxtaposition, the piece temporarily inhabits and weirds the inherited public interpretation from 1982.

A portion of IMAGE NATION: A Tour was first shown as part of the 2022 LMDA conference focusing on Performance Outside the Proscenium. After self-producing the work in 2022, Jenna is looking for redevelopment and production funding for Philadelphia’s upcoming Semiquincentennial in 2026.