In 2019, an extensive network of artists brought all their senses to the Mississippi River, paddling downstream in canoes, venturing up multiple tributaries, clambering over collapsing infrastructures, trudging across muddy banks and experiencing the river’s seasonal pulse. The project was entitled Mississippi: An Anthropocene River and it formed part of decade-long project called the Anthropcene Curriculum, sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. From the Headwaters in Minnesota to the Bird’s Foot Delta in New Orleans we set up five research hubs, delving deep into written and oral histories and creating works of all kinds, including guided tours, performances, pamphlets, lectures, shared meals and temporary shows for visitors and local inhabitants. Our concerns ranged across river ecologies, Indigenous, Black and settler-colonial histories, agriculture, urbanization, engineering, state and corporate violence, and the overflowing of liberation struggles that continue today.
How to put all that into a single retrospective? What we’ve developed is a collectively organized exhibition curating both existing and new works, gathering energy with an opening edition at Q.arma Gallery in Minneapolis, then setting out for further meanders downstream. Just follow the water to the latest edition: from the Mississippi up the Illinois, to the North and South branches of Chicago’s Backward River.
Co-Prosperity and a newly opened space, Watershed Art & Ecology, are the ports. The artistic research group Deep Time Chicago is the host. Love and chaos are the keys.
Welcome to the OVERFLOW.
