The tall willows, rocky banks, and thick meadows that stretch along the rolling Brandywine provided a sonic backdrop for a sound piece on the region’s cultural and natural history, composed by the artist and broadcast on provided radios along the trip. Naturalists from the Brandywine Conservancy provided commentary on the flora, fauna, and history of the region along the way.
The artist’s 12’ punt, a small boat constructed with the public over the course of his residency at the Brandywine Museum, accompanied the trip.
Book designed in collaboration with Partner & Partners, map designed in collaboration with Brandywine Conservancy’s Michele Gandy.
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The neon light references the river’s former industrial uses as a source of power. During the Industrial Revolution, the reign was a seat of power and hundreds mills were activated by the Brandywine (including the one you’re standing in now). The neon was fabricated with the specific constraint to use the amount power that the River could generate using an inexpensive consumer grade hydroelectric generator.
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Regional waterways once dictated where and how cities came to be built, and acted as a connective fabric between distant regions and peoples. They powered industry and provided residents with food and drinking water while serving the public’s needs for both transportation and recreation. My work invites the public to interact directly with their local rivers and streams, and to question the role of these waterways in contemporary American life as a means to thinking about larger ecological topics. The Brandywine flows into the Delaware and rejoins the Atlantic in the Chesapeake Bay, and in a sense, all waters are connected. The sort of work that the Brandywine Conservancy is doing on the Brandywine River contributes not only to clean drinking water for neighboring cities, but to cleaner Oceans.
If rivers are no longer harnessed to generate power, my work also asks: how might these rivers, along with other energy generating technologies, one day be harnessed again?
]]>We built The Floating Academy, as it came to be called, from discarded art crates “borrowed” from the Walker’s workshops. The Academy was comprised of rafts of varying sizes. We floated them out onto Lake-of-the-Isles, circled up, and held a seminar, the last of the series of Red76’s Pop Up Book Academy talks to be held in Minneapolis that summer.
]]>Our work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis. ML’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics. Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture, and temporary occupations, our work expands on Lefebvre’s “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways. Mare Liberum is premised on the speculation that water is a commons and the boat as a heterotopia – social platforms that catalyze societal change.
We have presented work at Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA, Neuberger Museum, Maker Faire, the PsyGeoConflux Festival, The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, EFA Project Space, Smack Mellon, Alexandraplatz, and the Antique Boat Museum, and have been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, and Vice Magazine, among others.
The collective was founded by Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen in 2007.
The collective is currently:
Dylan Gauthier, Sunita Prasad, Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Kendra Sullivan, and Stephan von Muehlen.
For more information, visit – http://www.thefreeseas.org.
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