Speech for an Empty Theater

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Tania Candiani, in collaboration with Ollin Miranda and Jillian Harrison-Jones
Speech for an Empty Theater, 2020 Color video, with sound

Filmed in Cincinnati’s Music Hall, Speech for an Empty Theater features a woman reciting a composite of phrases from the opening addresses of Cincinnati’s Industrial Expositions to an empty auditorium, the same location where the Expositions were originally held. The content of these speeches were highly patriarchal and dismissive of pre-settlement populations: “... [Our] State is proud as ... she has reclaimed our territory from the barbarism of a wilderness, made it to bloom and blossom like a rose, and beautified it with all the adornments of civilization.” Following the ancient Roman model, 19th century American art sometimes used female personi- fications of concepts and places. Examples of these are evident in the lithographs that marketed the Expositions, also on view here. The address concludes, “Let there be no black or white, nor rich or poor, but only man; no distinction of nobility ...” These utopian social ideals promised by industry were ultimately never realized and point to the fact that, although the Industrial Expositions claimed to champion progress, they were products of an inequitable society.

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