By DCist contributor John Harlow

Created and organized by artist and curator Mark Tribe, the Port Huron Project is a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and '70s, conducted at their original locations by paid performers. Previous PHP events have featured enactments of speeches originally delivered by Coretta Scott King and Howard Zinn in New York and Boston respectively.

Tomorrow at 6 p.m., the National Mall will host the third and final event here in D.C., featuring a reenactment of Paul Potter's "We Must Name The System" speech, originally delivered during the April 17, 1965 March on Washington. Potter was the president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the time, the famous New Left activist group whose political manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, inspired the name of this series. DCist caught up with Tribe to chat about his project, Potter's speech, and the role of social activism and art in today's America.

DCist: Since the project debuted in September of last year, you have conducted reenactments in Central Park and on the Boston Common. How were those events received by audiences?

Mark Tribe: Well as an artist is difficult for me to evaluate how audiences appreciate my work, but I spoke to several people after the show who reported feeling a surreal sense, a kind of temporal duality. You're standing in a park in 2007 listening to someone deliver a speech that was originally delivered 35 or 40 years ago. I think many people have found the enactments eerily relevant.

DCist: Wednesday's reenactment on the National Mall draws from a 1965 speech by Paul Potter, former New Left activist and director of Students for a Democratic Society. Potter's speech was about Vietnam and the rhetoric of militarist governments. Why did you select this particular speech?

MT: Well by 1965, the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for several years and there was a budding peace movement. The civil rights movement had been in full swing for several years, but the peace movement was just getting started. And I think we are at a similar place today, in that the peace movement is, I hope, just logging up. Potter's speech was also about how the language of freedom is used to justify war, which is something we have also heard a lot about from the Bush administration.

DCist: There seem to be echoes of the 1960s student activist movements everywhere in the project. But those movements were about young idealists seeking very tangible political and social change through radically original avenues. How can this kind of reflexive art capture that spirit?

MT: Well first of all, I am a tremendous admirer of the SDS. They were able to imagine very different worlds from the one in which they lived. That is something that I think is very difficult for us to do today. Its very difficult for us to imagine a world with alternative systems from the one with which we live. Its very difficult for us to imagine a world were democracy functions in a different way than it does now, or where war is not viewed as the only avenue toward peace. But the SDS was also very much about transforming student apathy into student engagement. Which is, I think, where we need to go today.

DCist: And you view your art as part of that movement today?

MT: A very small part. This is not a million man march. But art isn't about that kind of quantitative change. Its about more subtle internal transformations that occur in people. A march on Washington is an end in and of itself. These projects are more of a means to an end.

The Port Huron Project's reenactment of Paul Potter's 1965 speech, "We Must Name the System," will take place Thursday, July 26 at 6 p.m. on The National Mall, near the corner of Constitution Avenue and 15th Street.