Lucy Lippard's piece Lure of the Local discusses how the narrative history of place personifies a place -- which is the aggregation of culture, nature and history.
You can't separate a place from its narrative history, which continues to be informed by people's intersections with it. We're constantly cross pollinating places moving from one to the other.
"Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all "local places" consist of, writes Lippard. "By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.
Places are just as dynamic and organismic as people. This takes me on a slight tangent to another "place" where I spent a lot of time living. That's New Orleans. I lived there before the storm and near there during the event. When I returned afterwards, there was a period of rebuilding, which was as much about rebuilding damaged structures as rebuilding the narrative of the city. Deciding who was going to come back and who wasn't. Many newcomers arrived -- hispanic migrant workers because of all of the construction jobs, and pioneering artists and entrepreneurs that wanted to be part of its cultural recovery.
They all spoke about the unique vibe of New Orleans. The thing I kept returning to in my mind was -- that if so many people are not returning, what vibe is it these newcomers were sensing? Was it a vibe of architecture? Were there enough New Orleanians still around to share it or was it the vibe of the narrative of the city before the storm waiting to resume? For a while New Orleans was a ghost town -- its vibe was of abandonment and despair. These days six years later, it feels very much as it did before Katrina, except a little different. Less stagnant in some way. A lot of the driftwood has been shorn away. But there's still the palimpsest of identity that is comprised by a number of things: from buildings, to street names, to old homes, to people, to the creation legend of the city itself. However it changes, that deeper imprint of will always find a way to interact and interrogate its latest incarnation.
"The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand--our land, our place, the local. the lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies," says Lippard.
New Orleans is a cultural and artistic laboratory right now. It was completely emptied of people at one time and slowly repopulated with slightly different people who brought different stories to the city. Locals who returned had their own tales of woe. Much international attention has been focused on it too. All of this has created an outside narrative of New Orleans that has to influence life there and influence visitors' attitudes when they arrive.
That would be a great dissertation project to somehow -- without being too reductionist -- track the change in attitude and civic and social character with the change in narrative about the city. Maybe more of an artistic project. And I wonder what kind of tension is registered between the various narrative constructions and the various realities on the ground?
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