Between Piety and Desire...

Everyday when I drive to the site I cross two streets: first it's Piety and the next is Desire. Guess which is the busier street.

Speaking of the project, it's going well except for some stressful moments regarding the demolition of the house. It seems that the house is listed under Section 1 on the list for demolition. The city and the corp are willing to put us on the bottom of the list, but the house is going to be destroyed sometime in the near future.

So we're ramping up production and working longer hours to get sections of the job done before our deadline. Many people stop by the site wondering what we're doing or have heard about the project and just wanted to check it out. A pretty famous international artist living in NYC came by last Saturday. He is also working on a project for the 9th Ward.

Cheese cloth, latex, brushes, scissors: these are my tools for casting the house. Takashi says that these techniques we're using are very similar to those in lacquer arts. He trained with a lacquer arts master in Tokyo and is often reminded of that experience while we're working. Both lacquer and latex are tree saps.

I helped pull the porch section of the casting on Monday. It's pretty incredible the detail that is copied on the latex mold, the cracks in the cement, the ring where someone left a can sitting on the porch, the rings in the wood beams. The cast is like a documentation of all these things, a memory of textures, choices and processes from a life that once existed here.

St. Bernard parish is right down the street from us. It was also hit hard by the hurricane. I went to the local grocery, Breaux Mart to find some lunch there. I saw large jars of pickeled pig lips, to-go containers of bread pudding and boxes of grits. On my way back to the site I saw an abandoned restaurant, Chicken Box: Just Like Ya Mamas.

People are slowly rebuilding. Everyone worries and hopes that the soul of this place doesn't become just a memory.