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As part of this path, In 2012 I attempted to build the smallest boat that could hold only one person weight. As a result, I devised a precarious way to navigate through large bodies of water using a chair, while sitting and contemplating the landscape from within. This became a performance and then a film, which started in lake Wesserunsett in Main (North East of the USA) and then has been re-enacted in places like the Pacific Coast of Colombia, Mexico, California, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Philippines and Australia among others. The film ‘wonders-through’ this vast form of public spaces and explores nationhood as a form of contemporary confinement, while embracing on the ocean as an unlikely context for artistic interventions. Through a derive that blurs borderlines and even the natural and geological features of radically different locations around the world, this journey traverses not only space but also temporalities by exposing the complexity of a political system that restricts human movement while expanding its networks for the transportation of goods.
In this work, a performer travels across large bodies of water and through ten countries, while drifting away in a precarious raft that references make-shit strategies for border crossing, migration and radical seafaring.
As Nicolas Borrieaud refers in his book the Radicant: The artist has become the prototype of the contemporary traveler, homo viator, whose passage
through signs and formats highlights a contemporary experience of mobility, displacement, crossing. But this leaves us with the question: What are the modalities and figures of this mobility within art forms and dimension of the public? Borrieaud offers an answer:
The Journey has become. A form in its own right, the bearer of a visual matrix that is gradually replacing the ad-like frontality of pop art and the documentary enumeration of conceptual art. The emergence of the journey as a compositional principle has its source in a cluster of phenomena that form part of a sociology of our visual environment: globalization, the transformation of tourism into an everyday phenomenon and the advent of the computer screen.
Then, perhaps the artwork here is the journey, or the performance. Even the documentation of the work takes its own cinematic form. However, the journey is not just through landscapes but through the layers of meaning separating the land and sea, sites and non-sites, public and publicness. In this work the journey is the material and the form, reflecting also on today’s artistic mobility vs. migration, the complexities of landscape representations and the paradoxical search for sublime imagery in today’s volatile cultural and political climate.
• The Radicant, Nicolas Borrieaud. Sternberg Press. 2009
Credits
WIP