Featured image: “The Workshop” by Elizabeth Acevedo

In the aftermath of the multiple disasters that have hit New Orleans, Elizabeth Acevedo feels haunted by feelings of anxiety—about the possibility of dispersants in shrimp as eats Po’boys for lunch, about news reports of floods in the Mississippi watershed and the release of water in spillways, about the possibility of another hurricane. For Acevedo the future contains uncertainties and unknowns.

Acevedo was attracted back to New Orleans in 2010, after spending the early years of her adult life in San Francisco, Paris, New York, and Charlottesville, by ties with family and friends, but also by a place that felt complicated and more real. In New Orleans beautiful things appeared side-by-side with messy abandon.

Acevedo’s Disconnect series explores the sense of being alone that she felt upon returning to New Orleans. Around the city she was attracted to sites of abandon. Many places, like City Park, were still in a mess in 2010, six years after Hurricane Katrina.  The Disconnect series features a baseball diamond, picnic tables under the freeway, an abandoned maintenance building. By 2011, a year later, these same places in City Park were reclaimed by civic leaders who hosted Voodoo Fest, an annual musical event attracting the likes of Weezer and Ozzy Osbourne, around Halloween. Disconnect represents Acevedo’s struggle to be creative within spaces that have been abandoned, and then reanimated, by commercial enterprise.

Further Reading

Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “Hope In Blasted Landscapes” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 52.

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