#breonne dedecker

[antigravitymag]

Hidden Louisiana: Rum & Coke

by Breonne DeDecker art by Ryan Blackwood

Coastal Louisiana’s intricate mazes of marshes and bayous have long been safe havens for bandits. Perhaps the most known is the pirate Jean Lafitte, a much celebrated local legend, and the namesake of a bar on Bourbon Street, a national park on the West Bank, and a pirate-themed festival in Lake Charles called Contraband Days. His career of attacking merchant ships, establishing colonies of outlaws, and selling slaves has largely been romanticized into acceptability. Lafitte is seen more as a quaint local character, part of Louisiana’s colorful past, rather than one of the first in a long line of successful smugglers dealing in illegal goods.

For much of modern times, New Orleans’ role as a port city surrounded by swampy, rural areas provided prime opportunities for the establishment of large networks facilitating the flow of contraband. During prohibition, New Orleans was the wettest city in the United States, stemming from massive rum running operations funneling the Caribbean liquor into the States, as well as domestic moonshine operations that ran stills from Opelousas to the Mississippi line. When Governor Huey P. Long was asked what he was going to do to crack down on the booze flowing through New Orleans, Long, known for his love of gin fizzes, replied, “Not a damn thing.” [Read More]

[breakfastzinephotos]

Louisiana mile markers

Breonne DeDecker and Darin Acosta can't get enough southern Louisiana melancholy. They both work as wonks, trying day after day to carve out some modicum of sense within the deeply dysfunctional New Orleans city government. And when quitting time comes around, they obsess from a different angle.

For a while that meant writing songs for their band Small Bones about the abandoned Six Flags amusement park in New Orleans East, the great-but-unnamed hurricane that inundated New Orleans in 1915, urban planning schemes, and dinosaurs. But the band broke up and the two of them filled the void with The Airline is a Very Long Road, a website that they call "an experimental biography of Louisiana."

Named for Airline Highway, an early highway that cuts from New Orleans to Opelousas by way of Baton Rouge, the site is a multimedia, multi-disciplinary investigation of the historical sources and spectral echoes of centuries of human hubris in an inhospitable land. Trained in geographic information system mapping, inspired by author Mike Davis, and haunted by the 1988 Shell refinery explosion in Norco, blocks from Darin's childhood home, the pair present their findings not as polemical fact but as layers of feverish tragedy blurring past, present, and future into one revelatory melange. Living in New Orleans while studying the settlement of the floodplain and trying to affect its present-day ramifications is a recipe for madness and this work does a better job channeling and sharing that than anything I've seen.

Top image: Projection in the pine woods of Louisiana February, 2013

From 1917 until 1937, a socialist solony named New Llano scratched out a communal existence in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, on denuded land purchased from a lumber company. We projected an image of a flare stack from Norco, Louisiana onto the back of a couch found in an empty field where the colony once stood. The intention was to slightly collapse time and space, to project images from a community that is currently engaged an extractive industry (Norco, Louisiana was founded as a Shell company town) to one that was once engaged in an extractive industry (New Llano was founded after purchasing the nearly worthless land left over after a logging company clear-cut the pine woods in the early 1900s). These are two landscapes that are defined by the presence of industry, although one is from so long ago that someone passing through would not recognize it as such.

Projecting the flare stack into these woods is a way of making that past visible in a contemporary sense.

Stacked Timber Vernon Parish, Louisiana February, 2013

This image was taken inside the canyons of stacked timber at a log processing facility in Vernon Parish. There were no gates surrounding the facility, and we were able to walk in with no complications. There was an elaborate sprinkler system misting the logs with what I hope to have been just water, but as the run-off appeared frothy, was probably some sort of chemical solution. Vernon Parish and much of western Louisiana were part of the great Southern pine woods. Once stretching across 80 million acres, 97 percent of the forest was destroyed by industrial logging between 1890 and 1920.

Gert Town Pool New Orleans, Louisiana June, 2009

This community swimming pool was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While it was still standing, you could pry back some plywood over a window and crawl inside fairly easily. The pool had re-filled with rainwater, and was constantly moving with frogs and tadpoles swimming beneath the scummy surface.

The city bulldozed the pool in 2011, and Xavier University will most likely use the land for a parking lot. Gert Town is still waiting for a new pool.

Breonne and Darin in their own words:

Breonne DeDecker and mapmaker and videographer Darin Acosta produce the collaborative media project The Airline is a Very Long Road, which centers around vignettes representing different geographies, communities, and epochs. By connecting, juxtaposing, and deconstructing these vignettes, Airline tries to tell a larger story that challenges assumptions about time and geography. Each vignette is intended to stand alone, but together they produce a singular meditation on Louisiana.

More work can be viewed at www.verylongroad.com.

[astropress]

This interview appears in the March 2014 issue of Antigravity Magazine.

REFINING THE LANDSCAPE with THE AIRLINE IS A VERY LONG ROAD

Interview by Beck Levy, photographs by Breonne DeDecker

Breonne DeDecker and Darin Acosta, aka The Airline is a Very Long Road, are relentlessly interdisciplinary. Over the past year I have seen Airline include writing, projections, audio, film, and photographs. Their essay-length guides to lesser-known parts of Louisiana include research, reporting, and a bare, sharp narrative. DeDecker, in her words, was “born near the headwaters of the Mississippi River and now resides at the end of it,” and Acosta is from Norco. Their elegant photographs and reporting capture southern disintegration without idealizing it.

There’s something about immersing yourself into a place, devoting yourself to it, that has very specific literary and musical connotations. Airline shares a place in my heart–and in my esteem–with Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Bessie Head, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and certain Neil Young songs. The common thread here is transforming “living somewhere” from the passive to the active. It’s an artistic move from citizenship to stewardship.

Airline’s mission focuses their expansive project: they are committed to finding Louisiana and showing Louisiana. From the abandoned socialist utopia of New Llano to the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac in Plaquemines Parish, it’s a strange landscape. Deep into the age of rebranded neighborhoods (or “colonial hipster mayhem,” as Acosta puts it) we need bold, curious artists to navigate.

I talked with DeDecker and Acosta about the history of their project and their upcoming show.

What is The Airline is a Very Long Road? How did the project begin?

Darin Acosta: Airline is a research project that loosely centers around industrial development in the Gulf South. We use multiple mediums—such as videos, photographs, maps, screenprints, and remixed oral histories—to construct a broad narrative about the region's industrial growth and decay. The project began as a punk band called Small Bones. We were beginning to feel a little stifled by the range of creative expression (and data analysis) that the band allowed. While some of us turned to PhD programs and gardening, two of us decided to drill deeper into the themes that our lyrics explored: urbanization, environmental racism, gentrification, etc.

The Airline is a Very Long Road... more like the Airline is a very long name, am I right? What a mouthful. Where does the name of your project come from?

DA: It's a lyric from a song I wrote about a dude who's hiding along Airline from a roving gang of vigilantes. They finally catch up to him and drag him out into the swamps around the southern rim of Lake Maurepas, where they rough him up pretty thoroughly and leave him for dead. Half conscious, he crawls on his elbows and knees along Airline to seek help, and as he's crawling, he looks down the highway, and it just goes on forever. I think Breonne decided that the lyric should be our official project title, back when we thought we'd be focusing exclusively on Airline.

Breonne DeDecker: I was drawn to that phrase because it encapsulates how I think and feel about southeastern Louisiana and the American south as a whole. The Airline is a Very Long Road, to me, evokes traveling through not just a defined geographic space but also time. I remember in high school how history books would always have infographics where important events would be plotted out linearly– first this happened, then this happened–to illustrate cause and effect, or the rise and fall of an empire. I wanted the name to have similar linear connotations- the idea of a journey with no end in sight, where I could plot out both large themes and small moments, and explore how they interface.

Airline started as a punk band, and you're showing at the Community Printshop, which has strong ties to punk, queer, and radical culture in New Orleans. To what extent are you part of these communities? How much is your project or point of view informed by your participation in them?

BD: I’m a member of the Community Printshop, which is an organization I’m really excited to be a part of.  We’re a collectively run screen printing shop and darkroom that is open to the public and runs various community  programs. Although much of who I am is directly informed by DIY punk and radical communities, Airline grows out of some darker influences, which primarily have to do with growing up in places where radical communities did not exist. I grew up in a part of the South that was heavily impacted by racism, classism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism. Much of the counterculture was very nihilistic and angry, and oftentimes only compounded the structural violence surrounding me. Airline is partially about exploring that reality rather than existing within the blossoming radical community of New Orleans.

DA: All throughout high school, New Orleans punk rock allowed me to essentially take night classes on things like urban exploration, identity politics, and anti-war organizing. That entire experience of early-2000s punk rock had its own distinct aesthetic. Breonne and I became friends in our late teens, when we both had more access to those kinds of spaces, and I think we do tend to transmit a degree of punk nostalgia through the things that we produce. So while Airline is borne from a pretty complicated intersection of identities and experiences, I do feel that punk constitutes a significant part of its DNA.

Do you consider Airline to be an artistic endeavor, a community organizing endeavor, a storytelling project, or all of the above? Why?

DA: For me personally, it's a freeform research project. If it's got a community organizing dimension as well, that’s great! But probably incidental. I grew up in a town where the oil industry was extremely visible, and it affected the way I view the world very deeply. Ever since I was a kid, I've been trying to externalize that. But I do think that other people's stories get wrapped up in my own, and social justice themes come out of it; and I definitely welcome the times that we’re able to educate others, or allow them to express themselves through the infrastructure of our project.

BD: In the beginning, Airline functioned as a structure through which I gave myself permission to do whatever research I felt like doing. I tend to be a pretty scattered researcher and get excited about tons of different epochs, events, and theories; so Airline became a place where I could explore the relationship between, say, exploitative industries in Louisiana during the Reconstruction era and post-Katrina disaster capitalism in a format that isn’t as restrictive as academia. The same goes for my photography. My experience in art school was heavy on the idea that all of your images should easily be digested as a cumulative narrative. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I am more attracted to work where the narrative is slightly hidden, where the agenda is murky. I agree with what Darin says, that the organizing aspect of it is present but not the goal. Much of what we tackle is political, since economies and labor are inherently political, but Airline is primarily about creating an imagistic narrative of these larger social concepts.

What are some things you have done lately?

BD: We've been writing a few journalistic articles for a blog called American Guide. We recently did a piece on the Plaquemines Parish town of Ironton's fight against the proposed RAM Coal Terminal. We also have a short film in production, but we'll hold off on sharing too many details, since we don't know them ourselves.

DA: Outside of the darkweb, you can find us around town doing assorted things. We've given a panel discussion, denounced capitalism to a high school class, and will likely be screening movies and speaking to audiences in other forums as well.

For this upcoming exhibit at the Print Shop, what types of media are you including?

DA: We'll be mounting lots of beautiful photographs, maps, and screen prints; screening a few short films and some choice raw footage. And on opening night, our good friend DJ TV will be spinning some freaky ambient shoegazey stuff.

What do you want people to take away from your show? For that matter, what do you want people to bring to it?

DA: I've spent my entire life being awed by this region, to a point that I find it a little frustrating. It's so depressingly beautiful and absurd that I can't handle it. When I was a kid, my sister and I would frantically share our observations about the things we saw, and it gave me some comfort to know that I wasn't the only one witnessing the dead alligator, or the giant smoke stack, or the decrepit Scooby Doo stripmall. The itch to share that kind of thing has been with me forever. Airline provides a format that is at once structured and nimble enough for me to scratch that itch.

BD: So much of Airline deals with themes of contemporary decay, but the actual way the South looks and feels currently is not exactly what I am interested in talking about. Where we are now is the result of an accumulation of social, political and economic paradigms, and how those paradigms interact tends to enforce or replicate problematic results: environmental degradation, poverty, social strife, and political disempowerment. What we are witnessing is part of a larger tradition of how the South has been organized for hundreds of years, and that relationship is the core of what Airline is to me... There are two books that have really influenced the way that I think about Airline: Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, and Imperial by William Vollmann.

Human Smoke is a pacifist history of World War II, mostly composed of small diary entries, bits of telegrams, and short newspaper articles that show the escalation of violence in multiple geographies. It reveals the deliberate decisions that people in power made to escalate violence against civilians, and how those decisions reverberated and translated into further miseries, repression, and pain in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Imperial grapples with themes of colonization, environmental engineering and how Manifest Destiny has translated into desolate suburban sprawl in broke, isolated communities. Both use fractured narrative styles that appeal to my own aesthetic and way of thinking about history. This show is a work in progress, a first attempt at creating a space that weaves multiple vignettes from disparate locations and generations to say this is the house we live in, and here are the walls history built around us.

The Airline is a Very Long Road presents: Reflections on a Late Industrial Louisiana opens Saturday, March 8th at the Community Printshop, 1201 Mazant St. The show runs until Friday, March 28th, with open hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays from  6pm to 10pm. Check verylongroad.com or airlinehighway.tumblr.com for more information.

[americanguide]

HURRICANE ISAAC, ONE YEAR LATER - LOUISIANA

A year ago today, Hurricane Isaac hit New Orleans. The city was largely spared. Power outages darkened the streets, but when day broke, it revealed little flooding, and no damage from the storm surge. At the far reaches of the metropolitan area, in decaying exurbs and working-poor agricultural communities, the storm was far less merciful.

On the east side of Plaquemines Parish, which sits wide open before the Gulf of Mexico, the surge came down like a chop saw. A wall of water tore apart the town of Braithwaite. It ripped tombs from the cemetery and spread them miles around. They were flipped and tumbled into all sorts of odd arrangements. Some sat in piles. Others were leaning vertically against trees with their caskets exposed. People walked amongst the ruined graveyards, scrawling their names and phone numbers on the tombs of their deceased kin. Houses were lifted up and deposited on the crest of the twenty five foot levee that ran along the Mississippi River. Every little thing in sight was waterlogged and broken. The air was heavy and stank of rot, insinuating the number of dead animals deep in the surrounding woods.

From Braithwaite, the storm continued west. LaPlace is a community on the opposite side of Lake Pontchartrain. It’s a vast horizon of parking lots and low-rent strip malls. Subdivisions blossom out across the hollowed bottomlands like nebulous dust. Following the initial surge that took out Braithwaite, Isaac entered Lake Pontchartrain and gathered a second surge, building strength and racing towards Laplace.

Though the survivors have moved on and memories have faded, there exists a rather dramatic precedent for Isaac’s path.

In 1915, a hurricane came out of the West Indies. It hit the coast with force, spared New Orleans, and cut a line across Lake Pontchartrain, building a surge as it bore toward the west side of the lake. It exploded onto the cypress shores with indescribable fury, annihilating the small German settlements of Frenier and LaBranche. All the homes were blasted and strewn across the lake. Many of the villagers died. A few were able to survive by taking refuge in a stalled boxcar even as the train trestle it rested on began to disintegrate.

Today, Frenier is a sparsely settled fishing outpost and LaBranche is a cypress swamp that hasn’t seen any residential development since that tragic storm. But things could have been different. In the 1970s, during a rapid stage of St. Charles Parish’s industrial growth, land speculators were pushing hard to turn LaBranche into the diffuse exurban landscape that the nearby town of LaPlace is today. Speculators were buying up huge tracts of land all across the swamp. These investors believed that the Army Corps of Engineers would build a hurricane protection levee along the shore of the lake, thus making their properties eligible for federally subsidized flood insurance. Wetland preservation policies forced the Army Corps to reroute the levee, which now runs roughly parallel with Airline Highway and less than a quarter of a mile to its north, making development of the LaBranche Wetlands financially infeasible.

The day following Hurricane Isaac, Breonne and I visited the Wetland Watcher’s Park, near the site where the extinct town of LaBranche once stood. The park benches, anchored in cement, were ripped up from the ground and strewn about. Boardwalks that previously traversed the cypress swamps had completely collapsed into the water. Mud and sediment carried by the storm surge clung to every surface. The storm’s strength and intensity were evident, but since the area has remained mostly undeveloped since 1915, we witnessed little destruction. I imagined if LaBranche was the enormous lakefront suburb that many had hoped it would become; if rather than upturned benches and felled cypress trees, there existed the dream homes of Lakeland Gardens, or the office complexes of the LaBranche Industrial Park. The concrete slabs of these developments would have rested on the literal bones of the extinct village of LaBranche. Would it have met the same fate? Would Isaac have overwhelmed the neighborhood’s flood protection levee like Katrina did to the Lower Ninth Ward? Would the pumping system have failed, as has happened countless times in communities across south Louisiana?

From LaBranche, we continued on to LaPlace, where those notional scenes of suburban devastation became reality. Standing water covered the streets. Home-interior detritus lined every curb, some of it stacked eight feet high. We were unable to see the most extensive devastation because the streets were too flooded to continue. Red Cross emergency relief shelters along Airline Highway were packed. Hundreds of households were destroyed. Millions of dollars in damage had been wrought.

Nearly a century divides the West Indian Hurricane of 1915 from the storm that devastated Braithwaite and LaPlace on August 29th of 2012. The parallels between these two storms are a large component of our research into the cycles of creation and destruction that occur socially, economically, and environmentally in south Louisiana. Highways, storm drains, oil pipelines, floods, flames, and the decline of the late American suburb are all netting in the tangled web that marries these two storms. Our research continues forward, but we wanted to use this anniversary as an opportunity to share where we’re at so far.

Words & Map - Darin Acosta; Images - Breonne Dedecker

Guide Notes:

See longtime St. John Parish resident Donald Tregre as he tells stories from the West Indian Hurricane (1915) and Hurricane Isaac (2012) in THE WEST INDIAN HURRICANE OF 1915 

Map: 1970's Speculative Land Developments in the LaBranche Wetlands

* * *

Louisiana Guide Darin Acosta has spent his entire life exploring and documenting the wetlands, oil infrastructure and forgotten blight of South Louisiana and studied urban and environmental planning at the University of New Orleans. Louisiana Guide Breonne DeDecker was born near the headwaters of the Mississippi River and now resides at the end of it. She has degrees in photography and sustainable development. 

Their current work, The Airline is a Very Long Road, is an experimental biography of Louisiana, which you can find at airlinehighway.tumblr.com.