A watery city: summer 2006
Louisianans live in a watery place. You sense it entering New Orleans on the nearly two-kilometer bridge through the Bonnet-Carré Spillway, bald cypress-dotted wetlands on either side of you. On stormy days, the murky swamp seems so precariously close to the highway pavement that driving on the bridge’s rain-drenched lanes feels like gliding on the surface of water.
[see : Mithra, Mark Bradford, 2008, Installation view, Prospect 1, New Orleans. https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2019/04/mark-bradford-long-museum-1024x683.jpg Photo © Mark Bradford and Hauser & Wirth]
Downriver from the other side of the city, exotically named barrier islands off the Mississippi Delta have simply been swallowed up by the sea. Isle Dernière disappeared in an 1854 storm, Manila Village during Hurricane Betsy (1965). Today, Isle de Jean Charles, home to Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw indigenous people, has already lost most of its landmass to climate change.
New Orleanians ori...