The early cemeteries - St. Louis Number One and Number Two, ...were quickly surrounded by the growing city. Today they are strange oases. One walks from a street teeming with life into a silent town of the dead. Decay is everywhere.

Mary Cable, 1980

Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans Creole Cemetery

This exhibit, and the Dead Space Studio (2001-2002) out of which it developed, began as a reconsideration of previous research and conservation efforts concerning New Orleans' "Cities of the Dead." It has sought to go beyond architectural analysis and the physical restoration of the tombs and monuments to issues of past and contemporary meanings and associations of these places as cultural urban landscapes and the related aspects of use, abandonment, ritual, and preservation of many such historical necrogeographies.

As re-evaluation has progressed, the work has focused further on an exploration of how earlier site histories have influenced current attitudes and values, and how these, partly as invented narratives, have helped to shape motives and methods of preservation of these places over time. Such concerns are related to the larger cultural questions of the 'construction of identity' and the 'invention of tradition' that have been of interest to historians, anthropologists, and sociologists for at least a decade. Moreover, they beg renewed consideration of such places--as J.B. Jackson has long observed--as social constructs formed over time rather than only as designed entities, "...regarded first of all in terms of living rather than looking." Consequently, the role of history, personal and collective memory, and changing concepts of space and time--as well as death--in the making of such places all need to be better understood. In so doing, we can begin to reconstruct a greater understanding of New Orleans' early cemeteries in which physical transformations and cultural meanings can be studied by working back through time to reveal past realities and current conditions.

Consideration of these issues in practical terms has recently introduced a more critical approach to the actual preservation of places of cultural and historical significance. Today heritage preservation, tourism, and development have become common partners in exploiting local natural and cultural resources in an effort to attract investment and compete in an ever-tightening global economy. Too often, the result has been the denaturing and ultimate destruction of places rather than sustaining them through a balance of tradition and change responsive to the value and significance of the historic environment.

Despite national trends in declining interest in visiting the deceased, New Orleans has long remained fixated on death and its cemeteries. As a result, with tourism increasing daily to these sites, commercialization, overzealous restoration, and looting have impacted them in new and adverse ways. Underlying these problems is the more fundamental question of the continued relevancy and practicality of these places as sacred burial sites, an issue confronting many such older urban cemeteries and burial grounds. Shifting and declining populations, redevelopment of surrounding land, space limitations, and changes in burial practice and religious observance have all challenged the primary function of these places for the interment and veneration of the dead.

Conversely increasing pressures from heritage tourism have presented problems of visitor safety, owner liability, and access while the rising market value of cemetery art has escalated the need for better resource protection from theft and vandalism. Yet tourism, as an associated activity beyond the primary physical and spiritual necessities of burial, has been an important influence since the early nineteenth century in shaping public perceptions of the city and its Creole culture as well as the sites themselves. Consideration of how these places were perceived and experienced in their complex roles as both sacred and secular sites and what such places mean to us today in our desire for authentic as well as leisure experiences may hold the key to their continuity and successful preservation. This exhibit is but a prologue to the myriad of issues and sites to be explored through multiple lines of investigation and analysis to understand the rich and complex information to be gained from a cultural landscape approach to these places. In so doing it is hoped that their value, meaning, and preservation will be explored from the broadest perspectives possible.

Opening quote: Mary Cable, Lost New Orleans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, 127-128.

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.