There is no question the re-enactment will contribute to the broader conversation about memorials and Southern history that was catalyzed by the 2015 massacre of nine African-American churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C. New Orleans removed some of its most high-profile Confederate monuments in 2017 after street protests in which hundreds of anti-racist activists confronted scores of alt-right defenders.

Today, the bases of a couple of statues remain — transformed, in a way, into knotty conceptual pieces themselves.

Mr. Scott’s idea for the project predates the Trump presidency; he has been planning it for more than six years. The re-enactment, he said, is not about slavery, but self-emancipation — “and people who had the boldest and most radical idea of freedom in the United States at that time.” Some believe the rebels wanted to seize all of Orleans Territory, which includes present-day New Orleans, and establish a state where human bondage was abolished. Mr. Scott said he wanted to show how everyday people had “resisted a brutal system of enslavement that everybody would think was unjust, and see this was the only way they could get free —- and then they could draw conclusions about how people need to get free today.”

With a wide mohawk and spectacles, Mr. Scott, who was born Scott Tyler, speaks quickly and precisely, with a hint of accent from his native Chicago, where he grew up on the punk rock of the Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys, and found art-school inspiration in the original Dadaists and contemporary conceptual artists like Hans Haacke.

His previous pieces have addressed the victims of United States bombings abroad and police violence against people of color at home. As a self-proclaimed communist, he hopes his slave revolt re-enactment will show what radical solutions look like at a time when he believes the country, and the planet, need more than just incremental change.

“Their solution was to end slavery,” he said of the original rebels, “not to form a super PAC and see only if they could get whipped Monday through Friday.”