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On the calendar of anniversary events in New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina, one stands out: a party tonight at the Eiffel Society, a new restaurant and lounge on St Charles Avenue, where guests will be asked to celebrate something good the storm left behind: a burgeoning and highly boisterous arts scene.
It's an eruption that has provoked – and is sustained by – an influx of mostly young and creative people from across the US, all with the common hope of finding inspiration and purpose in the battered urban landscape of the city, including painters, film-makers, dancers, designers, musicians and architects.
Some will be at the party on St Charles, like the American painter Elliott Coon. This spring, she and friends with the Life is Art Foundation here in New Orleans, spent 30 days barricaded inside the octagon structure of glass and steel (it was once part of the tower in Paris), sleeping, eating, working and playing without leaving it once, though they were occasionally joined in their experiment by other artists.
The result will be on view for all the party's guests, set to include the city's new mayor and enthusiast for the arts, Mitch Landrieu, and the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Never mind what's for dinner; look at the art they have installed, whether it's the pagan-like labyrinth painted in grey and gold leaf across most of its floor by Coon or the mesmerisingly delicate embroideries of naked figures suspended like cobwebs in the central skylight by the British artist, Louise Riley. (Riley was there for much of the live-in too.)
Other pieces – there are 20 – include a book table from wood salvaged from Katrina-stricken homes by Robert Tennan, a legendary figure among New Orleans art-goers, and, hanging over the kitchen door, a slate-grey photograph of a tug surrounded by oil from the BP spill taken by Edward Burtynsky.
What may not still be there this evening is a very large igloo sculpture by Daphane Park that diners are invited to step into. Wild and woolly and made of stockings and other soft materials on a wire frame, it is called the Semi-Conductor, and has a vaginal quality that is making the restaurant's owners queasy.
Giving a reporter a sneak tour, Coon speaks of her own experience visiting New Orleans two-and-a-half years ago from Virginia where she was living at that time. She expected to be here for a month.
"It was like there this rebirth going on in the city. I just stayed," she explains with a broad smile, aware that in staying she was becoming part of a club of people in New Orleans that is hardly exclusive.
Michael Martin, 24, who is doing a masters degree on the role of cultural activity in recovering economies, did the same, arriving here from New York at the beginning of last year. Today, he has no plans to leave. "Most my friends are either artists or designers or architects," he says. "We are all here doing creative things, because New Orleans is just this amazing palate that gives you space to do what you like."
Kristian Hansen, 31, arrived a few months before Katrina from his native California and bought a house. The storm destroyed it and today he rents in the grandly eccentric (and art-stuffed) home of Tennan and his wife, Jeanne Nathan, on Esplanade Avenue. Renting is fine, he says, but best of all is the growth of a film production company he co-founded here with a friend. Called Tungsten Monkey, its newest project is a nearly completed documentary feature about a young New Orleanian from a well-to-do-family who travels to the jungles of Peru in search of salvation from drug addiction.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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