Mapping the "Signs" of Sandy in Story
The Project:
As some of you might have gathered from last class, I have decided to change my mapping project to one that builds on a project I am working on with Ateqah about Hurricane Sandy called “Signs of Sandy”. Our initial work and project involved “mapping” a short route through the Rockaway Beach neighborhood in Queens – beginning at the 90th St. train stop, a few short blocks to the beach, and then looping back past Rockaway Taco to the train. Our goal was to document all “Signs” of Sandy – both visually evident and intangible – that hinted at the current state of the neighborhood. We were also curious whether the physical signs of the storm’s lingering destruction (and rapid rebuilding) were consistent with the human stories.
We documented this route through audio interviews, ambient field recordings and pictures to create a “soundwalk” or on-location audio tour. The goal was to augment the typical beachgoer’s experience of the neighborhood with personal stories and memories that are not immediately evident in the physical surroundings.
For the purposes of this class, I am interested in further mining these interviews, as well as excavating (theoretically but maybe also literally doing some digging or hands-on work) the physical landscape of this neighborhood to try to reveal the multi-layered reality of recovery and rebuilding after such massive devastation. It’s interesting to consider maps as a qualitative and narrative tool used to map the intangible, as opposed to their traditional purpose of demarcating the exclusively visual and physical landscape. In our experience, the story that the “Closed” signs on doors told was very different from that of the story told by the owner behind the door. I hope to explore how maps can be used for storytelling – to tell the layers of stories or “submerged” stories, or even problematize quantifiable or physically evident data.
Mapping/Methodology:
As we have discussed in class (and observed in Lien’s Sandy map critique) there is a tendency to oversimplify the story of Sandy, or at least conceive of recovery as a linear, unified process with clear boundaries and quantifiable outcomes. Even in this small neighborhood the map of recovery is much messier, multifaceted and associative.
The tour that we plotted out for the original project is intentionally straight forward in order to easily access people from outside the community – meeting them where they likely will be, on the most frequented path to the beach. But through this mapping project I’m interested in discovering the multiple sub-narratives (lets call them layers) that run throughout and between the stories we gathered. I’d like to explore a process of wayfinding through something other than space to find different narrative arcs through the same material – themes of community, resilience, government neglect, social dynamics between hipster “outsiders” and locals.
Media:
I see this as perhaps a more poetic interpretation of mapping. I would like to work primarily with my own audio interviews and pictures collected, but will also supplement this material with crowdsourced pictures from before and after the storm from participatory documentary projects like Sandy Storyline, print and radio news coverage and historical images of the area. Sandy has become the defining event of these neighborhoods in the public consciousness in the sense that the history is perceived in the narrow time period BS (Before Sandy) and AS (After Sandy). My own interviews articulate a similarly narrow story of immediate effects. So I would like to take this class to further delve into the history of the area to understand the strong community ethos and resilient spirit that was evident in all of my interviews and which played a huge role in community-sustained recovery efforts.
Inspired by the Nowviskie/Drucker article, I’d also like to try and explore discursive temporality as it relates to disaster by analyzing interviews and comparing personal testimony to news coverage and existing maps like Lien’s and others generated by FEMA and government orgs. People spoke vividly about how long the hours of the storm felt, the interminable feeling of being in a shelter when there was no sense of when it would end or where they would go.
There is much to explore and I’m excited to discover how this research can deepen, expand and productively complicate my existing project.
yay! so happy that you’ll be giving our project the extra TLC it needs!! i love working with you and i’m so excited to see how this new iteration turns out!! xx
Lovely, Josie! This project seems to resonate (pun intended!) much more strongly for you. I’m excited, too, to see how you can use mapping as a creative methodology — to map the intangible and the “submerged”; and perhaps to, as you put it, “problematize quantifiable or physically evident data