Confluence 2007
video & sound by M Clarke / 5:09 (excerpt) 		 





 
I traveled, often in the summer, from New York to Maryland, to visit my father since I was very young. The intensity of living between two places, of the situation, and between the climates made both places seem like different spaces I was continually trying to conflate. Later in life I noticed that I continued to travel extensively up and down the North East corridor, relatively between the same geographic spaces. I noticed I was exploring a space in itself, compulsively back and forth. I noticed other people, and any number of material things, in nature or development and refuse, following these paths back and forth, sometimes mixing or crossing. I read and thought about the rivers and tributaries that connect in this space, the history and people that traveled by river between territories in this space, the water that continued to roll. One day I saw, that this roll of water, while it seemed to swell and move on, it also seemed to stay in place; it was pushed back in its own force. And, the water from one tributary remained in its form, for some time, before accepting the other. Confluence is an open ended question about drive and spatial journey. It asks are we destined to give in and be swept in, do we move homogenously in the same paths; do we push up to inevitability meet an inert existence.



All Images, video and sound / Copyright Melissa Clarke