Monuments To Vanishing Cities
New Orleans Elegy At Socrates Sculpture Park Seeks New Home In NOLA
Deborah Fisher, New Orleans Elegy, 2006, bronze over steel armature, 10"x40"x38" Top: as installed at Socrates Sculpture Park. Bottom: detail
New Orleans Elegy is a living map of the city--the first in a series of bronze monuments to cities that are in danger of vanishing because of climate change and other complications arising out of civilization. It is seeking a (relatively) permanent home in New Orleans.
The entire gulf coast is experiencing serious land loss because of human development, levee-building, and other attempts to keep the Mississippi River from meandering. Additionally, as much of New Orleans is below sea-level, it faces a similar fate as Amsterdam and even New York City as sea levels continue to rise. Even though rebuilding New Orleans has become a political imperative, the land it sits on will be at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in one hundred years or less. No matter what we do.
It is difficult to envision or accept something as huge as a whole city going away. In order to understand that decay or loss, New Orleans Elegy is built as a living system whose purpose is to decay. The city's grid is represented in steel wire that is overlaid in bronze. This bronze overlay reacts chemically to the steel and causes corrosion, which will, over many years, cause the streets to rust away entirely, leaving only a memory of where they once were. Because New Orleans Elegy is a living system, it changes from week to week as more corrosion causes the steel streets to separate from the bronze, changing in shape, color and texture.
New Orleans Elegy is the first in a series of proposed monuments for cities that face either total destruction or radical change because of their relationship to the earth itself. I am currently working to place similar monuments in the Netherlands, New York City, Venice, Miami and Galveston. As public art, these monuments are a call to action. They remind us all that civilizations come and go, and that our actions today directly impact the very presence of coastal cities tomorrow. One day these monuments will become bronze artifacts of lost or radically altered cities. These artifacts will record in bronze, a uniquely archival material, the absence of the city that once stood.
New Orleans Elegy only happened because it was generously supported by the Puffin Foundation and Socrates Sculpture Park. Please contact Deborah Fisher if you are interested in further supporting Monuments to Vanishing Cities.
