Float on! A/AA takes to the water
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Float on! A/AA takes to the water

For the last week of the Anywhere/Anyplace Academy, Red76 is joined by artist, writer, curator and boat builder, Dylan Gauthier.  A brave sailor of the waterways of Brooklyn, NY and its surrounding canals, channels, and bays, Dylan will lead the envisioning and building of the last school–a floating academy.

Red76's Sam Gould and Dylan Gauthier row the SoS Temporary, constructed during a class at Surplus Seminar in Columbus, OH, 2009.

As a member Mare Liberum (The Free Seas), a collective that publishes books and builds boats on the Gowanus Canal, and a partner in the adventuresome Empty Vessel Project along the same polluted channel, Dylan is interested in collective boat-building as a creative, sustainable act. In cities that have a great deal of urban waterways (like New York, actually, and of course, Minneapolis/St. Paul), boat travel can foster exploration, sustainable travel and different relationship to one’s landscape or seascape, so to speak.

Dories built by Mare Liberum, courtesy www.freeseas.org

He brings this vision to Minneapolis, and invites your participation. Over the next few days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday; August 5-7) A/AA builders will turn their attention to constructing a multi-part raft made from the Walker Art Center’s surplus.

This floating academy–in whatever form it will take–will launch on the final day of Surplus Seminar, this Sunday, August 8 on Lake of the Isles at 1 pm.  We’ll be at the canoe launch near the intersection of Penn Ave. S. and Lake of the Isles Parkway. That afternoon we’ll gather for a final “class” to discuss what we all hold in common as participants in A/AA, including the resource of water. If you are interested in talking about water-as-commons, utopia, decolonization, or DIY music venues while floating on a hand-made, surplus craft, please join us.

For inspiration:

from jhkohnen via Flickr
from Kentucky Photo File via Flickr
from richard harrod via Flickr
from b_owen_ca via Flickr

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