“We Can’t Keep Doing This” (2019) was based off the New Orleans’ lynching of eleven Sicilian/Italian immigrants on March 14, 1891. Many New Orleanians with Sicilian heritage, myself included, have no knowledge of the events nor of the struggles our ancestors faced in becoming accepted members of the “melting-pot.” In this project, I re-introduced this event, intending to make it common, historic knowledge. I also wanted to draw an empathic line connecting the struggles immigrants faced in the past to the reality that mob and police violence has never disappeared. Yet the stories of the victims do.
This project was a grant-funded, temporary public monument conceived and executed with Colloqate Design and Paper Monuments in New Orleans March-April in 2019. My monument was constructed using an ethereal vellum paper and was designed to naturally decay over the course of the monument’s 6-week installation period. In collaboration with photographer Brennan Probst, this decay was to be documented and collected into a lasting photo-series which was intended to explore social amnesia and its effects on social empathy. Despite permits and assurances, my monument was destroyed by city ground keepers 2 ½ weeks into the project.
