When a House Dies
After Hurricane Katrina, artist Loren Schwerd went to New Orleans. The trees, stripped bare of their leaves, bore strange new fruit. Hair extensions, commonly used by African American women, had wrapped themselves around limbs in a macabre reminder that the storm had turned everything inside out. This hair, a not-so secret secret, was ripped off of heads, torn out of drawers and exposed to the elements. It flew from houses through gaping holes carved into siding, brick and wood by the tempest.
All over town she encountered the remains of houses bled dry of their innards, torn from their foundations and collapsed to their knees. She waded through the detritus that had leaked from the wounds in the walls; the cracked open windows bled furniture, appliances and clothes; the innards of the houses oozed out of fresh wounds in the walls; beams of wood emerged painfully from roofs, like compound fractures. She found these bodies slumped, in piles, awkwardly collapsed into themselves, and littered throughout New Orleans’ poorest wards.
Calling upon the tradition of 19th century hairwork, where family members hair was woven, twisted and shaped into wreathes, jewellery and other tokens by which to remember loved ones, Schwerd created strange memorials. She crafted models of these deceased houses using mixed media and incorporating the extensions she recovered from ghostly, bare trees. The result is an acute memorial at once sentimental and macabre, moving and humiliating.
Buildings are bodies that suffer cold, heat, age, the blows of gusty winds, the weight of snow and ice. In as far as memories are created in relationship to space, we suffer a loss in the death of a home. We suffer a loss in the abandonment of a home. What memories are lost in the burial of a place?
