Shelter/Dwell
Requiem 48475
Final Project

Requiem 48475

Final Project

 

​

Requiem 48475 is a meditation on loss, resilience, and remembrance. Centered on a salvaged wooden statue of the Lady of Guadalupe—transformed here into the patron saint of hurricanes—the work memorializes the destructive and regenerative forces of nature. Found relics—a rock, tile, and pottery—speak to what endures amid ruin, while fifteen keys honor the fifteen lives lost in Miami-Dade during Hurricane Andrew. Illuminated from below, the Virgin’s gaze sanctifies these fragments. The pedestal’s inscriptions weave histories of storms, activism, and survival—reminding us that from each tempest, physical and spiritual, communities rise again—down but not out.

​

Details about the pedestal:

​

The pedestal beneath her bears four narratives: one side reads “Andrew was here” and glows faintly with the words “Down but not out”—echoing the graffiti and aerial images that came to define Hurricane Andrew’s aftermath. Another recounts the story of how hurricanes once bore only women’s names, and how a feminist activist from Miami fought to change this practice. A third face tells of the forty-foot statue of the Lady of Guadalupe, blessed by the Pope, lost in a Mexican hurricane and astonishingly recovered by another storm ten years later. The final side traces the deep history of hurricanes, from prehistoric storms revealed in sediment to the first recorded tempest witnessed by Columbus’s fleet in Hispaniola.

​

​​