Mare Liberum is a collective of visual artists, industrial designers, and writers who formed around a shared engagement with New York’s waterways in 2007. As part of a mobile, interdisciplinary, and pedagogical practice, we have designed and built boats, published broadsides, essays, and books, invented water-related art and educational forums, and collaborated with diverse institutions in order t
o produce public talks, participatory works, and voyages. Our work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis. ML’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics. Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture, and temporary occupations, our work expands on Lefebvre’s “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways. Mare Liberum is premised on the speculation that water is a commons and the boat as a heterotopia – social platforms that catalyze societal change. We have presented work at Hors Piste 2017 at the Musée d’Art Modèrne de la ville de Paris Centre Pompidou, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Parrish Art Museum, Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA, Neuberger Museum, Maker Faire, the PsyGeoConflux Festival, The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, EFA Project Space, Smack Mellon, Alexandraplatz (Montreal), and the Antique Boat Museum (Clayton, NY), and have been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, and Vice Magazine, among others. The collective is currently: Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Dylan Gauthier, Arthur Poisson, Sunita Prasad, Kendra Sullivan, and Stephan von Muehlen. For more, visit: http://www.thefreeseas.org.
