“I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
Thou seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.

Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.
OVID, Met. I. 39”

~Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849)

highwatermarks is an immersive video and audio installation that was envisioned, filmed, and edited during the artist’s year-long residency at the Brandywine River Museum of Art which focused on key aspects of the Brandywine Conservancy’s activities. The video and sound environment depicts the river and its people through four seasons, blending views from the Brandywine landscape with on-water shots filmed from a small boat constructed by the artist  at the museum.

The video is a micro-level investigation of environmental issues that affect rivers and streams throughout the world, a portrait of place – the Brandywine River – and an ethnographic portrait of the community who live in the region, use the river, and find themselves in it.

In our current moment of global ecological uncertainty and increasing evidence of the human hand in shaping nature and climate, I was interested in focusing on the Brandywine as a site that has been made and remade continually over successive epochs of human ingenuity and discovery, and through engineering, agriculture, manufacturing, and now tourism.  While a river like the Brandywine may appear to be a natural system, human beings are inextricably linked to that natural system – we might attribute this human hand to a history of environmental degradation.  Thoreau realized this in traveling on and writing about the rivers in Northern Massachusetts, and Hudson River School painters were depicting these very changes in their work.  At the same time, the current work of the Conservancy shows that through stewardship and organization, policy and community-building, we might also have a positive impact in preserving and conserving such fragile natural sites.

Sean Hanley (Cinematography),  Yoni Brook (Cinematography), Meryl O’Connor (Editing), Brian Hutchings (Color)

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.

° ° °

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?

Click here for the accompanying publication, KiteScores, released through the Socrates site.

What kind of wilderness is the Newtown Creek, and how to make work about it?  A Superfund site, a public place, an active place, a deeply damaged place, a disaster… With what tools and what language should I work? How to do so without aestheticizing this damage, without generating more “disaster porn” the type with which we have already grown too familiar? Without glossing, either, the fact that this Creek is both a public health menace, and a livelihood for human and non-human actors alike, it is vital, inhabited, and used. What are the aesthetic challenges and responsibilities in making visual work about such complex and contradictory post-natural sites?

“I will build a small boat in the studio to ply the banks of the Newtown Creek. The boat will become a floating studio. A platform for investigation, public talks, picnics, field trips, and embodied research. We will expose our bodies to this ecology, study its industrial past, its toxicity, its post-natural present as urban wilderness, and its multiple futures.”

I compose a weekly “letter” from interviews, soil and water samples, and drawings from memory of the Creek’s bisecting stretches, streets, and kills. This letter became a hybrid video/website (What Wilderness: 9 Conversations on Ecology, Abstraction, and the Anthropocene) that resists its own aestheticizing desire. The small boat is fitted out with sampling and recording devices, including an underwater LIDAR imager, and a small radio transmitter to stream data and audio back to shore. Each day at 7 am, I invite someone to accompany me on the water, to talk about ecology in relation to their work – on nature, abstraction, community, the idea of wilderness, the literature of ecological crisis – here, on a site of ecological crisis, which in turn stands in for the broader crisis we are currently living.

See also: What Is This Hidden Wilderness (2015)

Interviews with:

Mary Walling Blackburn, Una Chaudhuri, Willis Elkins, Sam Gould, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, Sto Len, Maureen McLane, Aviva Rahmani, Mark Read, Brie Ruais and Marina Zurkow.

Excerpted from the publication:

“When we first started working with Bea at the Sunview, the front window was filled with a tangle of plants, mostly overgrown spider plants and ivies, that over the course of the first winter had frozen, thawed, and froze again. Eventually they were hauled outside by an impatient film crew and never brought back (their pots still reside in the garden, sans plants). It always felt like a loss, though we get more light now, and Bea has brought in fake flowers and a couple of plastic potted plants which aren’t so bad. When Dylan started talking with Matej about a project to create an aquaponic growing structure as a sculpture in the Sunview’s window (and back yard), it was these first plants they had in mind. They had also wanted to build a garden in the Sunview’s back yard, but with the oil spill and all (you know just the largest oil spill in US history) and the toxic plumes, they had no desire to actually plant anything in the ground, fearin’ what it might bring up. They decided instead to build an indoor/outdoor mobile aquaponic sonic phonic hydroponic garden. Aquaponics is a viable system of growing plants alongside fish in a symbiotic circle of life/waste in which the fish poop is used to fertilize the plants and the plants give the fish a reason to live, which then cheers the Sunview up over the cold winter while providing fresh herbs and small vegetables to members and the public.”

stolon, n. (botany): a creeping horizontal plant stem or runner that takes root at points along its length to form new plants.

Stolon/Station is a low-frequency radio station transmitting from inside Hunter’s Point South, a post-natural wilderness zone, which was up until late 2016, the last undeveloped parcel of land on the East River in Long Island City.

The station relayed a soundscape of the post-natural into the adjacent waterfront park, and out onto the East River.  The radio program consisted of field recordings taken inside the wilderness zone, combined with commissioned pieces from sound artists, ecologists, and urban explorers.

The station broadcast a continuous, 24-hour program over four consecutive days – August 28, 29, 30, 31 in 2015 – and intermittently thereafter, on 91.9 FM.

One example: barred from travelling to Kosovo for a 2011 project with Red76, I built two Mari tables in a disused storefront in Long Island City in parallel with two tables that were to be built within the hosting art center in Priština.  The tables became work surfaces for a project called Kosovo Reading Room (2011), an open access bookmaking studio and library which I operated with Kendra Sullivan that summer. Skype calls with Red76 and talks and screenings in the Long Island City space that were broadcast to Kosovo created a link between and a mirroring of the two sites, reinforced by the presence of Mari’s tables in the two sites. Moreover, Mari’s aesthetic served as a touchstone to the project’s focus on the “parallel education system” that operated clandestinely in restaurant backrooms and cellars to ensure the education of Kosovar nationals in the years surrounding the Kosovo War (1998 – 1999).

As much a toolkit a philosophy for a pragmatic and socially-engaged form of design, Mari’s Autoprogettazione aims to “teach anyone to look at the present state of [industrial] production” with a critical eye. Mari suggests that good design must orient toward “real needs” rather than aesthetic innovation, because “everything exists already.”  His work calls the user of an object to play an active role in the object’s design and construction.  By extension, we are encouraged to remake the world with our own hands, based on essential needs.  While you do find reproduction Mari furniture on the Internet these days, the authentic Mari is the one you build.

For Accompaniment, Mari’s tables are (re)constructed in collaboration with specific needs and requests by the curators and other artists in the Accompaniment exhibition.  Enzo Mari is contacted and asked to be interviewed about his work as it has figured as a site of and support for accompaniment.

During the fair, the shed served as cover for the collective’s bookmaking equipment / bindery as well as a pop-up shop for Red76 books, some extra special goods, and other contributions (publications, ephemera) by friends engaged in the fight for housing, shared control of public space – right to the city fights, occupations and re-imaginings of our experience(s) of the urban fabric.

After the fair the bookshed was moved to the lot of Frank Traynor, who was working as an art handler at the fair and expressed interest in it.  It was eventually incorporated into The Perfect Nothing Catalog, Traynor’s backyard art shanty/gallery located behind Signal Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn.