The exhibition series Reconstituting the Vanished: Gender, Memory and Placemaking in the Delta South is a collaborative work. The photographer/artist, Lynda Frese, and I strive to mediate between the seemingly incommensurable realms of public understanding and theoretical rigor within a public history project about women's contributions to architecture and building. This series began with separate documentary exhibits examining the lives of two women using photographs and narrative to re-tell their story in a public display format. We used physical places as the common ground of these women's lives to avoid the agency/social construction debate; there is always interchange between the individual and their environment. Popular memory is easily recovered in both the material and idealized landscape for it is here that we can examine the way in which personal memories and public discourse are crystallized in a story or event.^{Ref. 1} We want to extend a new feminist reading of these women's pasts and the places they built to recover and reconstruct a new gender-inclusive public memory.

Both women, Marie Thereze Coin-coin (1742-1816) and Micaela Antonia Almonester y Rojas Pontalba (1795-1874) left indelible marks upon the real and imaginary landscape of French-Spanish-American Louisiana. Born a slave, Marie Thereze Coin-coin became the mistress of a landed Frenchman in Spanish Louisiana. When she was forty-four years old, with fourteen children, he granted her freedom and gave her a small parcel of undeveloped land into which she built one of the largest plantations in northern Louisiana. Before her death she had purchased all of her children and grandchildren out of slavery and left a wealthy legacy to her descendants who remain in the region today. Micaela Pontalba (née Almonester), the only child of a wealthy Spanish government official in New Orleans, was married at the age of fifteen to her cousin living in France. Court documents and personal letters indicate that domestic abuse began almost immediately culminating [some twenty years later] in a physical attack that left her permanently maimed: her left lung and most of her left hand were destroyed. Shamed by Parisian society and denied access to her children, Micaela sailed to New Orleans to reclaim her father's property and to build within the old part of the city a development in the grand European style. Her legacy, the Pontalba Buildings and the transformation of Jackson Square, define the city's French Quarter style today.

We began with personal accounts and local histories in order to examine the discourses and practices of everyday life and the intersections of the private sphere with public life. Both women have substantial built projects attributable to their visions and actions, yet have been conveniently dis-remembered by official narratives of the nation/state/region. The disintegration of public-private boundaries in our project is an attempt to reestablish women within the cultural landscapes of their time and commemorate them in current historical memory.

The tension and conflict between pubic/private, myth/truth, memory/history became the productive moment in our project of reconstitution.^{Ref. 2} The political economy of memory and archival "fact" is important; cultural outsiders such as women and ethnic peoples have ample repositories of memories while at the same time possessing very little historic capital.^{Ref. 3} Memory is a continual layering, an accretion of places, stories, and events tying us to the past. Memory accommodates the facts that suit it. In outsider history, memory becomes a foil against the hegemonic tide of official interpretations. It may be softly focused or skewed. According to Pierre Nora while history is an analytical secular production process, memory references the sacred and the prosaic; the two, history and memory, form a complete pair.^{Ref. 4} History belongs to everyone and yet no one whereas memory is both plural and individual; history establishes temporal continuities whereas memory flourishes in spaces, places, images and objects of remembrance.^{Ref. 5}

Our form of presentation is not linear; it did not have a traditional beginning, middle and end that tends to overdetermine meaning. Instead, the reader can begin at any point in the exhibit and thread a remarkable tale of both agency and social situatedness in the construction and memory of women's spaces in the Mississippi Delta as told through the textual, material, and oral traces found today. Documents, archives and photographs, current and historic, were used in our methodology as well as interviews with distant relatives and current community members. Louisiana has many traditions of conjure women, psychics, and seers, some of whom we interviewed as informants helping us to further interpret and utilize the textual traces that we found. Meaning and factual evidence were not granted equivalent weight in our project as the archive often represented what was important in dominant male culture. Instead, our methodology more closely resembled an anthropological 'reading' of the past giving authority to interviews, photographs, and spatial interpretations.

What follows is a slightly edited version of the two completed women's history projects accompanied by the photo-texts. The captions after each photograph were not part of the original exhibit but illuminate the artifactual content of the digital photographs.