After walking Charm City?s streets and talking to residents, Kianga Ford believes Baltimore is peculiar yet irresistible.
Inspired by Baltimorean?s true stories, Ford wrote and recorded fictional stories for the audio tour, “Charm City Remix,” available with iPods at the Contemporary Museum as apart of the exhibit “Re-Mapping.”
“Until you put on the headphones, walk out the door and hear Kianga’s voice, you don’t fully appreciate the relationship this work has to cinema,” said Irene Hofmann, the Museum’s executive director. “The tour becomes a cinematic and immersive experience.”
The uncanny moments when reality parallels Ford’s unfolding fictional narratives strike Hofmann as particularly interesting.
Accompany Ford?s grabbing voice is a score by Grammy-winning musician Brian Sacawa and Erik Spangler, known as DJ Dubble8. The soundtrack reflects “Baltimore?s musical history from a military drum and fife to Billie Holiday and the contemporary Baltimore Club music,” Ford said.
Ford hopes the tour nudges us closer to seeing “our environments and each other more consciously,” she said. “By adding fictional characters to the tour on the landscape, I?m able to indirectly ask listenersto look at how they look at other people.”
The tension between the desolate blocks of boarded home and polished areas luring tourists to Baltimore especially interested Ford. “There were constant surprises in the sense of demographic changes and how they affect who lives close to whom. There?s a palpable distinctness or division in Baltimore that you don’t see in other cities.”
The tour begins in Mt. Vernon but listeners can go beyond the center of the city by selecting tours of west and east Baltimore, and South Charles Street to the Inner Harbor.
Ford?s “Charm City Remix” is a part of Baltimore?s Festival of Maps and the latest in Ford?s on-going series “The Story of This Place,” which explores the art of sound and environment. She?s created audio tours for L.A., North Miami, Alexandria and Bergen. Ford will return to the Contemporary Museum in the fall for her exhibit, “My Life with Fiction.”
IF YOU GO
Charm City Remix
» When: Through May 11
» Where: Contemporary Museum, 100 West Centre St., Baltimore
» Info: 410-783-5720
