Seeking the Source was a commission by Arlinda Shtuni for the exhibition "Waterlines" at the Somerville Museum, in Somerville MA (USA) from December 2022 - March 2023, and then reconfigured for display at The Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Boston MA (USA) from May 2023 - November 2023. The project consists of collection of objects (divining rods) with soundtracks. The soundtracks are available here: https://soundcloud.com/seeking_the_source
Seeking the Source uses water as a metaphor for intuition, and the persistence of the practice of dowsing in the modern world as a symbol of our capacity to retain and nurture intuitive understanding even while we rely on technologies and enlightenment-age logics for our day-to-day operations in a way that would seem to make intuition obsolete.
This image is a collective portrait of a divining rod made by participants in a workshop in 2022 in at the ARoS museum in Aarhus Denmark. The workshop was a collaboration with a storyteller and involved an hour+ long conversation about how we discover our intuition. The audio recording of that conversation, accompanies the object pictured here in installations and can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/seeking_the_source/17-portrait-of-a-divining-rod-made-at-aros-museum-in-denmark
The development of Seeking the Source was supported by The Somerville Museum, Flux Factory, ARoS Museum, Useful Art for Communities, USF Bergen, and The Metropolitan Waterworks Museum.
Seeking the Source also inspired a small performance art festival about the spirit of water called “Evaporate” that I co-curated at the end the exhibition at the Waterworks Museum. Video documentation from the festival is included here as well.
Documentation (by Sue Murad) of the Evaporate Live Art Festival, a collaboration between Mobius (Boston, USA) and Performance Art Bergen (Norway) artists at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. The festival occurred over the weekend of November 4-5, 2023 and featured solo and collaborative performances by over 20 artists across the two days.
"Organized by Mobius member Heather Kapplow and PAB member Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Evaporate consists of two days of performances that activate the museums’ exhibition halls, grounds, and the nearby reservoir, flowing through these spaces in a quick rush, as the city’s water once flowed through them, and then dissipating just as quickly."