HOPE IN BLASTED LANDSCAPES

Eben Kirksey, Nicholas Shapiro, and Maria Brodine

In early November 2010, the multitude of creative agents animating the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans descended on a warehouse, the Ironworks, and hastily remodeled it as an art gallery. There curators gathered together some sixty artworks orbiting around a central question: "In the aftermath of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?" The Ironworks became a site where culture workers who were deeply implicated in sweeping political, economic, and ecological transformations cautiously explored future horizons in the wake of recent disasters that put New Orleans in the national spotlight. The opening night of the exhibit coincided with the Second Saturday Art Walk in the emerging Saint Claude Arts District. Hundreds flocked to the Ironworks, crowding to see a recycled fashion show by Calamity, a designer who outfitted models in postapocalyptic garb and crust-punk drag. The usual crowd of bike-riding twenty-somethings was there in full force. A strong current of cleaner-cut middle-aged viewers and a sprinkling of out-oft-owners rounded out the masses. "I flew down from New York for this," a beaming fifty-year-old noted as she slipped on headphones to hear the beehive of the SOUND::MEDICINE::HOUSE installation, composed of wood and plants salvaged from nearby blighted buildings.

Dark, dystopic images, a digital rendering of fugitive emissions from nearby oil refineries, flickered overhead. Illustrations of deformed and crippled insects, collected from the shadows of nuclear disasters, covered a makeshift plywood wall. Images of chemical oceanographers—working to make sense of molecular and microbial transformations taking place near the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion—fueled discussions about upcoming protests against BP and funeral processions for the creatures killed by the flood of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. One might expect that this accumulated evidence of advancing disasters—a perfect storm of human follies and agencies beyond the control of gallery visitors—might dampen their revelry. Instead, these signs of calamity strangely fueled a celebratory atmosphere in which it seemed as if anything might happen at any time.

Amid revelry in the wreckage of natural and fiscal catastrophes we found semi-empowered intellectuals who were embracing and tussling with forms of collective desire. Powerful forces have tried to appropriate the very idea of hope. As a vacuous political slogan, "hope" has bulldozed over our dreams. Yet artists, scientists, and other culture workers gathered together at the Multispecies Salon to engage in strategic storytelling about Hope in Blasted Landscapes. Building on the critical insights of these storytellers, this essay explores the persistence of life in the face of catastrophe. Following people, and following multiple species, from the art gallery to the blasted landscapes of New Orleans and beyond, we trace the contours of modest forms of biocultural hope.

OIL IN WATER

The flood of oil spreading in the Gulf set the backdrop for the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans. When news of oil plumes first reached Jacqueline Bishop, an artist who teaches at Loyola University, she was hardly surprised. Some five years earlier, she had created Trespass, an uncanny illustration of disasters looming on future horizons. First exhibited in the months before Hurricane Katrina, this assemblage of flotsam and jetsam—baby shoes and birds' nests, toys and balls of twine—contained aesthetic premonitions of the floating debris that were omnipresent after the storm. Coated in a black patina, a dark, glossy finish like crude oil, this artwork also prefigured the oil flood that came in 2010. At first blush, from far away, Trespass seems to just be a collection of wreckage—a dreadful rendering of disaster. When viewed from the middle distance, it appears to shimmer and dance about like oil in water—moving in different directions, coalescing around a heterogeneous collection of objects. Scrutinizing this aqueous landscape at a close range, moving in even closer still, reveals that it is populated with hopeful figures.

A figure might be regarded as "a fashioning, a resemblance, a shape; also a chimerical vision," following Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum of 1730. "To figure" also means to have a role in a story. Gathering up desires, figures serve as anchoring points for dreams. If, at a distance, Trespass seems to be a uniform black morass—prefiguring Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil flood—closer inspection reveals colorful organisms hiding in the shadows. Mushrooms, seed pods, and birds' eggs anchor hopes in living forms. Like a bird's nest, built from scavenged detritus, Trespass nurtures hopeful dreams. The figural play of this assemblage works with shifts of scale: A sea slick with oil and wreckage, an unfathomable disaster when viewed from afar, contains anchoring points for hopeful desires that can be grasped on a molecular level. Zooming in reveals that when droplets merge together, when they grab hold of almost imperceptible figures, they generate dynamic coalescences. Panning back out reveals the dance of oil in water.

Looking to possible futures, rather than to absolute endings, Jacques Derrida draws a helpful distinction between apocalyptic and messianic thinking. Messianic hopes contain "the attraction, invincible élan or affirmation of an unpredictable future-to-come (or even of a past-to-come-again)," writes Derrida. "Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever." Yet Derrida's sense of expectation is not oriented toward a specific messiah. In contrast to Christian traditions, which pin hopes to a particular figure, Jesus Christ, Derrida's notion of messianicity is "without content." Celebrating messianic desires that operate beyond the confines of any particular figure, he describes a...