Us Mail Project multimedia project - 2427 Piety St. - New Orleans - USA - 2006 - 2010

The US Mail Project is an artwork that takes a house condemned to demolition by Hurricane Katrina and investigates the process of transforming it into a new symbol.

Using the obsolete, tangible medium of the US Postal Service, the project was designed to focus on a single house that would be dismantled, packaged and mailed to a specific location. Via this process, the US Mail would become the unconscious guarantor of a fragment of American history. Every envelope would be legitimized by the stamp of its corporate identity. Every package would be an official document, ordered and acknowledged by an official governmental system.

On August 13th 2006, the US Mail Project came upon 2427 Piety Street, a single-storey house in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The proprietor Ophelia Evans, currently residing in Texas, was contacted by telephone. She consented to the project. Later that day, as her family looked on, the porch of this house was disassembled. On the days that followed, the shattered fragments of this construction were collected, sealed into US Mail boxes, and dispatched to a storage unit.

Throughout the physical disassembly of the porch, a multi-faceted team of individuals was present to assemble new narratives from alternative levels of information. An architect produced isometric records of the construction. A sound designer recorded the noises of its disassembly, to recreate the structure as a sound sculpture. By this process, alternative records have been made to contribute to deeper, more intelligible responses from that provided by the media. Previously overlooked data has been salvaged from the rubble.
Around the four walls of the building, four thematic pillars have emerged, forming a new informational structure between man, house, natural disaster and the US Postal Service. The USPS has acquired significance here as the transmitter of a global collective memory. As Hurricane Katrina obliterated the symbolic mailbox from the stoop of this American house, one might expect it to have dissolved the memories within.

Instead, the house that cannot receive mail will soon become mail.