MAXIME BERTHOU & MARK POŽLEP / Southwind, 2019
PRESENTING THE EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
MAXIME BERTHOU & MARK POŽLEP / Southwind, 2019-ongoing
Installation
In 2019 Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep embarked on a month and a half journey on the Mississippi River on a self made steam-powered paddle boat. Contemporary US society was unravelling along this mythical river – poverty, poor health caused by toxic industrial pollution, racial inequality, all part of everyday life.
The Mississippi River, until today is the most important commercial waterway in the country, crosses ten states: Minnesota, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas. A body of the nation, a 3.730 km long embodiment of pasts, presents and futures.
Maxime’s and Mark’s trip started on 2 September 2019, a mere month after six months of flooding. Many of the cities along the upper Mississippi had been washed away, marinas have been devastated and destroyed and the infrastructure along the river abandoned, deepening the poverty and destroying the health of people. According to locals it was the most extensive and longest flood since 1993.
SOUTHWIND follows the chronology of the project in movement, translating it into an archive of personal experiences, oral histories, transcripts, displays of drawn portraits and photographic snapshots.
As with many of the duo’s projects, strong notions of sustainability and circularity fuelled this project. SOUTHWIND was funded by the pre-selling of Moonshine – local high alcohol spirit, distilled out of corn collected by the artists from the local farmers along the Mississippi river.
Mark Požlep (b. 1981, Slovenia) works in the visual and performative arts, with spatial installations and video art. His artistic practice involves journey-travels, which function both as extended duration performance/endurance art and as art pieces in themselves. It is an intense procedural exploration that aims to reveal the tension between politics, poetics, and individual action.
Maxime Berthou’s (b. 1981, France) artistic practice consists of making cinematographic essays based on his knowledge and experience of performative gestures. His work is part of a practice-based research context that superimposes an artistic framework on a scientific research.
