This counter-mapping project starts on the point of rupture and looks out across the cityscape toward the last point of free-moving surface. In documenting the altered landscape by surveying the plants growing within the sightline from the sinkhole to the historic path of free-flowing waters both the casket wreath and the botanical cartogram give visual and material form to the dislocated landscape of the Mississippi Fluvial Delta.
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Homage to a Dismembered Landscape
Casket Wreath, New Orleans
news footage, site-specific performance art
5 minutes 21 seconds
2024
Levees, canals, and pumps transformed the vibrant cypress swamp into a dismembered landscape through the draining of the wetland.
Walking the land around the sinkhole site, I collected plant cuttings and pulled them together into a wreath to lay at the site of rupture. This wreath served both to acknowledge the plants that now make up the living body of the landscape assemblage and to memorialize the destroyed cypress swamp.
2024
Botanical Cartogram: Mapping Disruption in the Mississippi Fluvial Delta
Mixed media installation with collected plant samples
watercolor and water-soluble graphite
Using collected plant samples to visualize the process of asset alienation in the Mississippi Delta, this project focuses on the disturbed plant life of the former cypress swamp. This cartogram includes cuttings from exotic, invasive, and distressed native species. Notably, non-native grasses and moss were the only botanical life growing at the rupture site. The cartogram provides a figurative shape for the displacement of more-than-human kin, illustrating the land's persistent instability and cultivating a necessary shared vulnerability with the historically erased ecology.
After claiming land from a cypress swamp, New Orleans now faces a future marked by more intense storms.
The artificial and prolonged separation of water from the soil created dismembered landscapes with a consistently altered state of interaction between animate and inanimate elements of the ecosystem—including the substrate, botanical life, more-than-human beings, and human beings.
The rally cry to defeat the water and add property to the tax base lead to the creation of the New Orleans Draining Company and later the Sewerage & Water Board. Now city officials contend with aging infrastructure built to handle the weather patterns and flood levels of a different climate. In 2018, with water running down streets, the mayor announced that the Sewerage & Water Board had hit pumping capacity. She followed this with, “We are a city that floods,” a confession that marks a shift in how the city relates to what was once called the backswamp.