Moved to action by the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans artist Jana Napoli collected hundreds of drawers from the flooded and abandoned neighbourhoods in the days and months that followed. These are now on view until 9 February in a site-specific installation, entitled 'Floodwall', along the length of Liberty Street Bridge in Lower Manhattan. Six hundred and ten drawers sit upright along a 230-foot long platform, standing like empty luggage without their passengers, and flowing like a levee, broken in places. Beneath the drawers, placed in intervals along the platform, moving-message LED signs silently repeat the words of the people parted from these drawers. Across New Orleans Jana Napoli collected 610 dresser drawers from the heaps of ravaged belongings in front of flooded homes in an attempt to preserve a small part of what the levees could not.
'Floodwall' has a life beyond this current art installation - each of the 610 drawers has been photographed and numbered, and Napoli is now hoping to collect the personal stories of these drawers, the homes they came from, their owners, and the neighbourhoods in which they lived. In an effort to represent all of New Orleans, at least one drawer was collected from every zip code in the city. Each drawer is catalogued on the 'Floodwall' website according to the New Orleans zip code and street in which it was found. People are invited to visit the website to see if one of their drawers is a part of 'Floodwall', and if so, to share their stories.
FLOODWALL
Until 9 February
7am-11pm daily
World Financial Center
Liberty Street Bridge
Enter at One World Financial Center, corner of Liberty Street and South End Avenue
New York
www.floodwall.org
)
)
)