a much mended thing Cristina Molina | Dean (Rocky) Rockwell
There’s hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain as we are of so much in this existence, this botched, cumbersome, much-mended, not unsatisfactory thing. Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”
Precarious spaces raise concern. It is the direct confrontation with crisis or instability that prompts an urgency for change. Our combined research begins from a post-crisis viewpoint. Through an exchange of a two year correspondence, we detail our experience of contributing to spaces that are actively being restored. One defined space is the American city of New Orleazns. The city’s below-sea-level construction, history of racial tension, and catalyst for the birth of Jazz music has earned it an infamous reputation. The other space is affordable housing units throughout the United States. Both spaces have been activated in positive ways after an initial collapse. For New Orleans, the devastation caused after hurricane Katrina has begun an initiative among cultural producers to question the initial problems of the city, and propose solutions for maintaining physical and cultural infrastructure throughout. While biking across the United States Dean witnessed how the American housing crisis has prompted nationwide initiatives to rebuild and restore housing for low income Americans.
Dear Dean, Which is better for creative production?—Feeling safe? Or feeling unstable? We project these questions onto the architecture of our cities , onto the natural world, onto our objects, and onto our varying states of consciousness. We agree that a combination of both precarity and stability proves to be fruitful. I propose that as long as one has inward structural stability, then one can deal with most external precarious situations, perhaps even thrive in them. While reading A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, I was struck by the main thesis of the book—contrary to media distortion, when confronted with disaster, communities typically tend to band together in forms of altruism.
Dear Cristina Is there a more stable place than the Northeastern United States in the summertime? We began biking in New Hampshire, where the old clapboard colonial homes looked so quaint as to be fake; as if we were on a movie set, or in a historic village, where people would come out of their homes in full costume. The small antique stores we passed on the road, the local libraries, the covered bridges. This was a world of comfort. Of swimming holes and farmers markets. Of antique car shows and Adirondack chairs. Despite this environmental stability, there was much uncertainty on Day 2. Support networks were forming, identities being tried on and discarded, there was posturing, bluffing, the testing of limits. What was appropriate? Who did I want to be on this trip? What was the identity of our group?
Dear Rocky, You refer to spaces that make you feel transcended. Such sites are usually suburban towns, architecture and landscape that have been manicured to project safety and the possibility of pleasure— the Northeastern United States with its “clapboard colonial homes looked so quaint as to be fake.” You prefer precarious conditions, when you can control them, rather than having them occur naturally. Often this surprises you—realizing for instance, that actually building homes during Bike and Build, although gratifying in theory is less interesting in practice. Dear Cristina Precarity can sometimes sneak up on you. I recently lost a journal that I wrote in from 2008-2013, it contained some writings that really helped me sort out who I was and who I wanted to be. Losing it made my life feel slightly out of balance. The journal was how I constructed an identity. It gave me a shield from the truth perhaps, but a shield that helped me to act confidently in the world. It was a stable foundation for behavior. I could return to it, remember who I was and get back to acting like that. This loss has helped me appreciate how devastating losing material objects can be. They shape us as humans, they are continually infused with meaning and used as support. Our cognitive abilities for remembering the past are very limited on their own, but with a prompt, a prop, a primer, we can suddenly remember vivid details of our lives. How do those who lost everything in Katrina cope with this tragedy?
Dear Dean, The question of managing loss is an important one, since arriving in New Orleans, I have been fascinated by the tight knit community here. More specifically, I have been interested in how a population who has suffered communal trauma, may have lost the majority of their personal belongings, but banded together more tightly than ever before, to restore their city. In New Orleans some architectural monuments carry symbolic meaning-The Super dome for example, still exists as a site of tension. It was the site that became home to thousands of displaced New Orleanians after hurricane Katrina. There was no electricity, no running water, and no help for days. Despite the rumors of mass murders, rapes, and other violent crimes that happened inside the dome--most people actually recount that the truly horrific experience was having to wait for help to arrive. Otherwise, groups of people comforted one another by singing at night, bands of men whom the media called “gangs” or “looters” would sneak out of the building to swim through the streets and fetch clean water and supplies for the elderly. When help finally did arrive, people acted altruistically and allowed others who were in poorer condition to eat, drink, and leave. Thousands of people called this their home. And they had nothing but each other. Dear Cristina, Yes I too found that community was important in precarious spaces. This support is crucial for dealing with hardship. New homeowners who were previously in poverty described to the riders on the bike trip some of the challenges of living in unstable housing. One homeowner described how she had to deal with flaky/unreliable landlords who would force tenants out with little advance notice. She also described predatory lenders, or bankers who told her she qualified for mortgages she would never actually be able to pay off. There were also language barriers as she only spoke Spanish.
Dear Dean, What is a home? We’ve discussed this. There are cliches like “home is where the heart is” or “building a house and home.” I think the reason I wanted to go into defining a home is because the ultimate state of precariousness may be not having a place to go. On Bike and Build, you learned how other Americans lived, in complete comfort, in middle class suburbia, or surrounded by blight. You assisted those who were just beginning to attain the American dream—a home of their own, a sacred place. Having a home allows one to be more than a mere survivor, a home seemingly makes one complete. The thought of no resting place, lack of safety, and inaccessibility to the essentials can quickly madden a person. The ultimate precarity seems to be not knowing whether one is going to live or die at the moment of homelessness. My friend and artist Maria Lino made a project called “home-less”. She asked various people what their idea of home was. One participant, art theorist Manuel Torres mentioned that one can see a person who lives in the elements dragging their belongings with them, and that these belongings are not their home--that the human body is the ultimate architecture. That always stuck with me. Dear Cristina, I found that new homeowners that we met on our journey described the home in different ways. One homeowner called it her baby, as it always needed work and there were constantly unexpected expenses that arose. Others saw it as a financial asset, as it is something that can be sold if things don’t work out. Having a home leaves money available for other things, one woman told us. Additionally, one woman reported that her new home is near a free health clinic, which enables her and her family to be much healthier. So I think one of the key questions is how can we move from precarity to stability?
Dear Rocky I think a successful rebuild would be an urban plan that makes its residents feel safe, included, and supported. Right now interstate 10 runs through the middle of New Orleans, over lower income neighborhoods so that anyone from the wealthier uptown area can glide over Treme, Mid City, and the Seventh ward without having to observe any poverty. All they see is LED billboards and an aerial view of the Mercedes Benz Superdome. The highway was built during the 70s Brutalist period when successful urban planning meant high speed, efficiency, and speedy movement of commercial goods through a space. What urban planners failed to mention is that some people were too scared to drive through these neighborhoods and that this superhighway provided a solution for avoiding any contact. When it comes to thinking about implementing structural change, I can’t help but to have a Modernist mind and a Romantic heart. Structurally and visually I want things to be organized, efficient, thoughtfully considered and functional. Socially I want to nurture the people who live in these places by offering beauty, good standards of living, and even pleasure and recreation beyond the rigid constraints of the efficient modernist model. That’s why I think the work I do collectively with other artists is important, we emphasize a life beyond “survival” and highlight the importance of creating cultural capital. Dear Cristina: This idea comes through in one of your more recent letters. You describe urban development in New Orleans. The marker from the back side obscures the text because it bleeds through the paper, frustratingly undermining the prescriptive solutions you provide for rebuilding your city. You talk about “divides” in the community and how the I-10 highway acts as a barrier. These structures, divisions and demarcations attempt to formally define the space in your city. But what about the ever present natural world? The menacing, salty ocean that made its way into the city in the first place?
Dear Dean, It’s late for me, and the city is startlingly quiet tonight.There are stacks of clothing lying on the couch in my bedroom mixed in with books and receipts. Little piles of things have gathered around the house the past few weeks --- they are waiting to be sorted and stowed away –tomorrow perhaps --- but for now since I am on the subject of piles, I will tell you that you can’t dig anywhere in New Orleans without finding a claw full of oyster shells. Within the soupy, spongy Orleanean earth are bits of these once pearlescent and muscular creatures. My grandmother told me that when she was pregnant with my mother she had an intense urgency to eat several dozen oysters. Her desire was so feverish that she bought two buckets of them and sat down on a stoop, shucked and sucked them down, and flung the empty shells back into the aluminum can. As she ate them, she said a lunar eclipse was happening and she could not feel more alive. My mother was born the next day, and even still when my mom gets angry or a little flustered, you can see the birth mark (or “lunar” as they call it in Spanish) spread over her forehead like some strange continent. I am also quite fond of oysters and so wrongly thought that they were nothing more than the mucous membranes of the sea. Since I am mostly vegetarian (with pescatarianism in the mix) I thought at long last I can eat these slimy, ocean mushrooms, guilt-free. After a bit of research though, I found out that they are very much alive, even up until the moment you separate them from their shell and gulp them down. Needless to say I was not very pleased by this news. However, some good has come from the consumption and disposal of fish carcasses safely deposited into the city soil. Mel Chin (celebrity artist and activist) worked with a team of scientists to develop a project in New Orleans called “operation paydirt.”Together they found that if the contaminated, lead infested soil is mixed with the phosphate found in fish particles and shells, the soil then becomes neutralized and safe for kids to play in.
Dear Cristina, It is interesting that you describe the benefits of the shells for the soil. You mentioned that artist Mel Chin worked with scientists to show how fish carcasses actually neutralized the soil and made it safe for kids to play in. This mending effect of nature enables children to experiment and explore. It seems that we need both physical structures and the natural world in this mending process. Dear Dean, It’s true that the natural world is needed in the mending process, but we know that nature is not always benign, in the case of disaster, it can create a threatening catalyst of events. Yesterday I drove with a friend down I-10 headed east, and pulled over at the side of the road to a pile of rubble that obscured several hundred feet of road behind it. A yellow-spray-painted plume blocked our path, and we quickly hopped over it to explore. One of my fellow artists has been fascinated by a series of abandoned exit ramps that at one point would have led commuters to their suburban homes in New Orleans East. Once projected to be a middle class utopia, a population of white flight-ers rushed the area anxious to start their cozy life style. Because the area did not develop at the pace they were expecting, many of them left, as a community of middle class African Americans planted roots there. After Katrina, a huge debate ensued, should the city’s officials just let the swamp take over this now blighted land, should it return to it’s “natural” order? Although not so direct, or politically correct, the answer was clearly yes. Now these exit ramps are over run with cat’s claw, decomposing snakes are being devoured by fire ants, swamp insects dart straight into one’s eyes as one traverses the once perfectly paved road--perhaps as a warning or a projection that says, “I don’t want you here, you don’t belong.”