Devika Coles: Places of Memory
Artist(s):
Title:
- Places of Memory
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2007
Medium:
- Hybrid digital video
Category:
Artist Statement:
Places of Memory recreates the emotional and psychological paradox of my experiences watching Hurricane Katrina through media reports and participating in the recovery process as a relief volunteer. I interviewed Wangui Kaniaru, a law student and volunteer in the Upper Ninth Ward. Her words articulated my contradictory experience of being removed from, and simultaneously embedded within, a community devastated by disaster. As the video plays, Hurricane Katrina, its aftermath, and the recovery process slowly unfold before the viewer in a giant, seamless composite image. The composite represents both my physical and psychological experience of moving through and working within a city still divided by the complexities of race, economics, allocations of resources, and politics. In essence, it is my visual memory of the recovery process in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina; an archive of an ongoing, evolving historical event that I experienced both firsthand and through mainstream media sources.
Technical Information:
Places of Memory seeks to use multiple points of view to construct new ways of seeing and remembering what happened in New Orleans. The internet provides an opportunity to research how Hurricane Katrina and the recovery process were visualized through images from mainstream, independent, and personal media sources (such as weblogs). Images were appropriated and combined with personal photographs
using Photoshop CS. iMovie was used to edit video and GarageBand was used to extract and remix the audio. The composite, sound, and video files were combined together using Adobe After Effects 6.5.
