On Saturday, November 19, from 6 to 9 p.m., the third phase of the Trinity River Project will launch, taking the form of a visual art exhibition at the Liliana Bloch Gallery. The project began with 10 essays on topics related to the Trinity, followed by three sessions of guided meditation along the old river channel, led by artist Marcos Lutyens on October 22.
The exhibition, which runs until December 31, will host a variety of artifacts from the project so far and is free and open to the public. Attendees will have a chance to participate in guided meditations in the gallery space at their leisure as well as view Lutyens’ drawings based on the essays.
In preparation for the exhibition, Marcos and I took a little time to revisit his work here in October.
LARAY: After one of the guided meditations along the old river channel, there was an egret that was wading along in the water. It was a strange, wonderful moment because that bird was observing us, too. But we didn’t frighten it off, which is usually the case. What did you think of that moment? MARCOS: This was a great moment as I had been watching the slender, white egret for a while, before people opened their eyes: from the time it landed by the edge of the river, to its walk downriver and past our group. It seemed to echo the role of a sorcerer’s “familiar” walking in the projected footsteps of participants in the muddy banks of the river. The egret would move and then freeze for a moment and then jab at the mud with its beak, almost echoing our own investigation beneath the surface of the physical river as it runs today—with each jab being equivalent to an investigation back in time. The inclusion of outdoor natural life and its permanently moving systems into the performance seemed to be a perfectly logical extension of the content of the meditations themselves.
Overall, what was your experience of the guided meditations in Dallas? I had an incredible sense of ease, despite leading the sessions in an area that had quite a lot of ambient interference, including nearby workshop machinery sounds, passing planes, and traffic noise. These can hinder people’s ability to focus inwards, but the warm morning sun and the sound of the insects and birds created such a strong counter-influence, that participants were in a sense journeying before they even lay down to close their eyes.
In terms of the delivery of the induction, I make a point of forcing my unconscious to improvise in its ever-knowing way by allowing a participant to choose the induction narrative, in this case from a selection of 10 options, which were in turn extracted from your perceptive and heartfelt essays.
It struck me that everyone seemed to easily descend into their own variation of a journey, and even participants who would not usually introspect seemed to respond in an open and profound way. This is why, when the session is over, it is so worthwhile to listen to comments of those who experienced the journey. The visitor is then visited, so to speak, and the learning process is woven in to the next session and beyond.
The middle of the three sessions was particularly striking when participants, wiping their eyes, shared what objects they had long forgotten and their emotional significance. The lost history of the river made a direct connection with participants’ sense of inner loss and recovery.
Had you conducted mediations/inductions outdoors along a river or bodies of water before? Last summer I led a series of inductions on a ship in the Sea of Marmara by Istanbul. The connection with water as an inductive medium is very compelling. Water is of course a symbol of the unconscious, but its imagined and actual effects of swaying and drifting are powerful in terms of accessing a deep trance state.
In Istanbul, the thoughts of visitors often went to migrants who were at the time losing their lives in droves, as they left war torn areas of the Middle East. The theme of water has been a recurring topic in and around my performances, including those I carried out alongside the River Fulda at Documenta (13), as well as one I performed on a boat that moved through the canals of Amsterdam. In this case the timing of the boat going under the bridges and changing the echo of my voice formed a kind of inductive grammar. The Trinity River Project is a welcome opportunity to extend this dialogue with and relationship to bodies of water even further, especially with the creative resonance and factual expertise provided by your essays.
I’ve enjoyed the collaboration, too, Marcos, and the opportunity it’s provided to view the river from a different orientation. Where to next in your interest of water? I would hope that we are able to take the Trinity River Project downriver, for instance, to Galveston. In doing so, I hope that we can bring the themes and issues of the Trinity to a wider audience and also perhaps include additional narratives and perspectives. Like you, Laray, I also have an ongoing interest in pressing issues such as sea level rise related to climate change. I hope to place a data-linked sculpture, called CO2morrow, that was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London at a UK University, and stream all sorts of climate related data into it. I am also working on a two-year project that aims to bring a pavilion to various sites around the world. The pavilion will explore themes relating to ritual and ecology in the context of our most precious resource: water.
