CONFLUENCE - Marie Lorenz

“Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses 1 .”
CONFLUENCE by Marie Lorenz explores the notions of common goods and places. Observing the relationships between an environment and the organisms that inhabit it, the artist sees her subjects as fellow travelers, from whom it is possible to move reality towards a poetics. She adopts an an anthropological posture of “participant observation [through which] the correspondence, whether with people or with other things, is a labour of giving back what we owe to the human and non-human beings with which and with whom we share our world, for our own existence and formation 2.” By surveying territories, she produces new narratives like a storyteller.
The exhibition highlights the urgent need to reappropriate controversial subjects in a sensitive and cultural way, while preserving the dissensus 3 they imply. Indeed, “[artists’] interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility of a common world and, with them, the capacities that any bodies can exercise on a new common landscape 4 ”. So, these goods and places of the common are as many sources of inspiration as they are tools with which to reflect on the complex and delicate relationships we maintain with our territories, our histories, our ecosystems, our habitat and our fellow human beings.
“An urban river is the best place in the world to contemplate the future of our civilization. By understanding these realms and our relationship to them, we might change course, not like the industrialists and city planners of the 1900s or 1990s, but in the comparatively simple task of shifting our own perception. 5 ”
For the past 20 years, Marie Lorenz has navigated New York harbor on a boat she built from scratch, using plywood and fiberglass. She brings along family and friends, other artists and volunteer participants, moving from river to river and islet to islet. This long-term process- work, Tide and Current Taxi, feeds a constant intuition in the artist’s work, that “when you find a network of forgotten public space, it opens the entire city 6 ”. As unprecedented, shared experiences, each crossing is an opportunity to document and map the surroundings. These elements are catalogued publicly to encourage their dissemination. They are also an opportunity to collect various types of garbage found in the water or on the shore, which the artist then reuses in her visual works.
From 2021 to 2023, she is collaborating on Newtown Odyssey, an interdisciplinary opera performance at Newtown Creek with composer Kurt Rohde and writer Dana Spiotta. The librettist’s narrative, combined with a specific scenography, aims to make visible the field of possibilities of these aquatic environments relayed to peri-urban areas, as well as the unique ecological challenges imposed by industrial pollution. The result is a recognition of waterways as social spaces, as sites where landscape aesthetics can capture the messy ways in which we relate to natural and unnatural things.
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Marie Lorenz, video/production/images
Charlotte Mundy, voice
Kurt Rohde, music/sound
Dana Spiotta, text