constance Book No.3
An (imaginary)
inventory of
*
(palimpsest) plants,
gardens, and
other related objects
*
in French colonial
New Orleans
By Ross Louis
inventory of
*
(palimpsest) plants,
gardens, and
other related objects
*
in French colonial
New Orleans
*
(palimpsest) plants,
gardens, and
other related objects
*
in French colonial
New Orleans
If I take a line for a walk, will I scratch the surface of the present?
If I scratch the surface of the present, will I leave a trace?
If I leave a trace, will I also unearth sediment from the past?
And then, will this imaginary palimpsest be made visible to me?
In writing about genealogy and her nostalgic desire to connect roots, geographical and genetic, Jade Huell imagines a poem. A poem about the perfect irony of home and past. A poem that moves in a circle. A poem about a gardener who plants her seeds in fertile ground.
Gardening (and genealogy too) is a palimpsest, “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.” In thinking about the three-hundred year history of French colonization at this place now called New Orleans, I imagine an inventory. An inventory of plants, of gardens, of the people who were made to work them, of their transport, of the records that make visible their names, of the records that say nothing at all about them, of the spaces where the plants, the gardens and the people who were made to work them may have once been, but are now covered in so much sediment, so much concrete.
This inventory will unfold at the sites where the invisible might be made “visible by manipulation, an experience.” This inventory will document “a parallel world, populated by beings who influence the path of things, or simply by that which nature and human actions hide.” This inventory will necessarily fall victim to “the loss of stories,” will seek desperately to “fill in the gaps and provide closure where there is none.” This inventory will construct “a sort of herbarium” that documents encounters with power, especially that of the archival sort. This inventory will listen attentively for “ghostly authors, voices, narratives, texts, contexts, places and spaces.” This inventory requires imagination.
Empty Harrah’s casino fountain, 2020
It begins with plants and with gardens, repeating—again—again—again—Uriel Orlow’s mantra in Theatrum Botanicum:
In a place where the politics of land and race are so central, plants were and are of course never simply neutral and passive botanical objects but have always been actors on the stage of history and politics itself.
This inventory (de)centers French colonial sites on the land that indigenous peoples called the “place of many tongues,” BULBANCHA, superimposing contemporary everyday practices onto written colonial history, wondering along the way if Thomas Holt is right in saying, “Power can only be realized at the level of everyday practice.”
Everydayness: “that part of human activity and consciousness left over after politics, wars, and the other big subjects and events have been addressed… the unexceptional, day-to-day arrangements and ordeals of individual existence, such as leisure, private life, or forms of passive resistance to authority... nothing less than resources for living, the tools for shaping a world for good or for ill.”
This inventory is also an archive. Or archival record. Or sliver of the archival record that provides a sliver of social memory. Or a sliver of a sliver of a sliver … It is exactly that. Verne Harris’ archival sliver:
A fragile thing, an enchanted thing, defined not by its connections to “reality,” but by its open-ended layerings of construction and reconstruction. Far from constituting the solid structure around which imagination can play, it is itself the stuff of imagination.
And because “there is simply too much evidence, too much memory, too much identity, to acquire more than a mere fragment of it in our established archives,” this inventory is incomplete.
Excerpt Text: Taking a Line for a Walk, Ross Louis.
An (imaginary) inventory of ...
48pg. 2-color Risograph 2nd Edition of 150The third in a series of trade-paperback publications that explore points of time within the New Orleans landscape-conceptually approaching them to allow us to rethink about less common tropes of what people feel our city is and isn't or ever was. $20.00 US
Available online and at these fine stores.
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