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Gallery I: Nature’s Curation
Nature is an active agent that selects, transforms, preserves, and erases.This gallery explores nature as an active curator—an agent that selects, transforms, preserves, and erases. Through visual, sonic, and interactive elements, visitors witness how entropy functions not as destruction, but as a curatorial process through which time, weather, and nonhuman forces rearrange the material world.
01
The Storm & Aftermath: Hurricane Katrina 29 August 2025
On August 29, 2025, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana near Buras-Triumph as a Category 3 storm.
Hurricane Katrina was the costliest and deadliest on record. It caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans when its levees failed, submerging 80% of the city and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The storm resulted in over 1,800 fatalities, caused approximately $125 billion in damages, and spawned numerous tornadoes across the Southeast.
Where human curation ends, nonhuman curation begins. Vines thicken into structural supports. Water stains mark new geographies. Wildlife draws new migration paths across old concrete grids. These transformations highlight entropy as a process of natural selection—not in a biological sense, but as a form of material sorting and slow re-ordering.
Nature decides what remains visible, what decomposes, and what returns to the earth.
02
Overgrown Lots: Nature Reclaims the Built Environment
On August 29, 2025, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana near Buras-Triumph as a Category 3 storm.
Hurricane Katrina was the costliest and deadliest on record. It caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans when its levees failed, submerging 80% of the city and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The storm resulted in over 1,800 fatalities, caused approximately $125 billion in damages, and spawned numerous tornadoes across the Southeast.
Once a hub of sound, motion, and spectacle, Six Flags New Orleans stands today as one of the most haunting embodiment of post-Katrina entropy. Flooded by more than seven feet of water and left untouched for months, the amusement park never reopened. What remains is a landscape where infrastructure has been surrendered to time, weather, and ecological reclamation.
03
Six Flags New Orleans A Case Study & Example of Nature as Curator & Entropy
The site provides a powerful lens for understanding entropy as a curatorial force: without human maintenance or economic investment, structures decay, collapse, rust, and dissolve into their surroundings. Walls blister, metal buckles, and signage fades under the relentless push of sun and wind. What persists are only the fragments that environmental forces have not yet taken back—an inadvertent archive curated not by human hands but by natural processes acting over time.
Through this deterioration, the park becomes an unintentional museum of Hurricane Katrina’s long aftermath. It reveals how slow violence unfolds after an initial catastrophe: political inaction, uneven redevelopment, and disinvestment leave certain spaces to decline indefinitely. The ruins of Six Flags New Orleans are not simply material leftovers; they are evidence of the uneven distribution of care and recovery in the region. They show how capital, policy, and ecology intersect to determine what is “saved,” what is “abandoned,” and what is allowed to rot in plain sight.
Pictures of Before & After The Historic Flood of Hurricane Katrina
01.
Jane Bennett — Thing-Power
Every object in this gallery—rust, mold, seawater, vines—demonstrates Bennett’s idea that things possess their own vitality. They are not passive leftovers but active participants in shaping the post-disaster landscape.
02.
Bruno Latour — Actor-Network
This gallery frames the landscape as network: storm, floodwaters, levees, abandoned amusement parks, and rusting steel. Each has agency. Each plays a role in producing the outcome. Nature’s curation emerges from the collective actions of these human and nonhuman actors.
03.
Haraway / Trächtler — Nature as a “Witty Agent”
Rather than treating nature as mere backdrop, this gallery positions it as a thinking, reactive force—one that improvises, adapts, and reshapes human spaces. The overgrowth, erosion, and decay are not accidents; they’re evidence of an active participant in the co-construction of the world.
04.
Entropy as a Curation Narrative
Decay becomes commentary.
Erosion becomes record-keeping.
Overgrowth becomes correction.
In this framework, time and nature curate what survives and what disappears—often challenging human intentions and rewriting memory in ways humans cannot fully control.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
