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





 
I traveled, often in the summer, from New York to Maryland since I was very young. The intensity of going between two places, between the climates and cultures, 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, 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 it; and the water just 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. Between waterways, personal histories, and in the context of the cultures along their path, do we all move homogenously along the same lines, or do we push up to inevitability meet an inert existence, as if pieces combined in motion but seperated by motivations.



All Images, video and sound / Copyright Melissa Clarke