The ‘Floodwall’ installation by Jana Napoli, an artist from New Orleans, opens at the National Museum in Wroclaw, south-western Poland.

The exhibit consists of 350 drawers and is part of the ‘Floodwall’ project, prompted by Hurricane Katrina that ravaged Napoli’s native city five years ago. Napoli spent several months wandering amid the rotting and moldy debris of New Orleans gathering household drawers. 

The artist collected over seven hundred of them, from dressers, kitchen cabinets and desks, empty of their contents but suffused with people’s memories as it is in the drawers, as she wrote, “that we store our secrets, our past lives, our photos, our mementos, our passions and our hopes and dreams.”

The installation is accompanied by a documentary film with testimonies of  those who lost their family in the hurricane and were forced to leave their homes.

US Ambassador to Poland Lee Feinstein, who saw the installation on the eve of its opening, commented that it says much about the life of the people experienced by a natural catastrophe. “It is incredible that this installation was brought to Wroclaw, a city which not long ago suffered in the flooding,” the Ambassador commented.

The exhibition opens on 14.07 and lasts until 05.09 and includes a series of lectures with the artist, film screenings and various other interactive projects. (mk/mmj)

Thenews.pl |