This gallery affirmed how nature acts as an active curator, selecting what remains visible and what fades from memory through processes of entropy, overgrowth, and erosion. In the case of Katrina, water itself became a narrative force—reshaping streets, swallowing homes, and preserving traces of the storm in layers of mold, sediment, and fractured architecture. The wetlands, disappearing long before Katrina arrived, testified to a slow violence that made the region more vulnerable to catastrophe. Through these images, I recognized that nature curates not through deliberate intention but through its dynamic processes that transform human landscapes. This gallery underscores that the environment is not merely a backdrop to disaster but a co-author of its meaning.

The second gallery revealed how institutions—media outlets, memorials, and government agencies—construct selective narratives about Katrina. Headlines emphasized chaos and crime in Black neighborhoods, shaping national perception while obscuring acts of survival, community care, and structural neglect. Official memorials often center sanitized or heroic stories, leaving out the systemic failures that magnified the disaster’s impact. The absences become just as telling as the inclusions, reminding us that human curation is always political. This gallery demonstrated that what is remembered from Katrina is shaped not only by nature’s force but by the power structures that decide whose suffering is visible and whose is erased.

The Capitalocene gallery illuminated how economic systems, industries, and extractive practices contributed to both the vulnerability and the aftermath of Katrina. Decades of oil-and-gas canal dredging eroded the wetlands that once buffered storms, while disinvestment in levee infrastructure created the conditions for failure. Here, disaster emerges not simply from a hurricane but from a history of profit-driven decisions that treat land and communities—especially Black and Indigenous ones—as disposable. This lens reframed Katrina as a political ecology of neglect, where capitalism functions as an unseen actant curating who is protected and who is placed at risk. It reminded me that the storm’s devastation cannot be understood apart from the systems that shaped its impact.

The final gallery brought forward the human stories that resist erasure—testimonies from survivors, artists, elders, and cultural storytellers. Their voices reveal a fuller picture of Katrina: the terror of the storm, the trauma of abandonment, and the strength found in community resilience. Paired with “nonhuman testimonies” such as levee animations and wetland erosion timelines, the gallery emphasized that memory is distributed across both people and places. These narratives reclaim agency from the institutional accounts that minimized or distorted their experiences. Ultimately, this gallery showed that memory itself is a collaborative act—curated by those who lived through the storm and by the land that still carries its imprint.