Sometimes we learn something about ourselves through an
outsider’s fresh-eyed perspective. This concept is being explored as part of a project by poet and performance artist Moheb Soliman, who is currently in the middle of
a mission to trace the borderlands of the Great Lakes, documenting and
digesting bits of interest along the way. Later this month, Rochester
Contemporary will host him when he pops in on our town, and the artist is looking for
suggestions about what to see and do.
“I’ve been in dialogue with him for about a year about his
projects,” says Rochester Contemporary director, Bleu Cease.
Soliman contacted Rochester
Contemporary when his project — for which he’s received a fellowship with the Joyce Foundation — was in the early
planning stages. He describes his work as “exploring the place of nature in modernity,
identity, and belonging.”
Since departing his home base of Minneapolis on May 31, Soliman has been traveling around the perimeter of the
lakes, making stops at art centers, preservation-minded organizations, and parks,
becoming acquainted with people and places along the way. He documents and
shares his journey through photographs, verse, and audio samples on his blog, A Great Lakes Vista.
Soliman worked to line up a lot of
his itinerary in advance, “but it’s also a road trip,” Cease says. There is
plenty of room for discovery. “It has some institutional structure to it, but
it’s also a big, personal documentary project. He’s collecting stories,
interviewing people. He’s trying to understand Great Lakes identity.”
One of the most unique things that Soliman
is doing, Cease says, is asking residents of the places he visits to show him
their home interaction with one of the lakes. Toward this end, he’s asking Rochesterians to email RoCo to sign up for an excursion around Rochester with him on July 29.
“We’re the outlier here,” Cease says, because most
of the stops on Soliman’s journey have some
affiliation with a lake. While our northern border does bump right up against
Lake Ontario, “most people in Rochester don’t really think of Rochester as a
lake city,” he says.
Even Western Ontario — on the northern shore of Lake Ontario
and bordering Lake Erie — is like a whole other world, Cease says. “It’s super
flat, the landscape’s totally different, and there’s a discernable Midwestern
accent. It’s just such a different culture.”
We are separated by more than bodies of water, but we also have
commonalities — not least of which the mutual and ongoing vigilance to protect
the freshwater we share from the perpetual threat of shortsighted industry.
But Soliman isn’t interested in straightforward storytelling; he exploits poetry’s non-narrative form and ability to convey a rush of
impressions and details in the way they are experienced. In his digital diary documentation
and during his performances at each stop, fragments of imagery, history,
and lived experience tumble back out of his mouth, turns of phrase jumbled and
juxtaposed like the fabric in a quilt, or patchwork farmlands viewed from
above.
Soliman is also disrupting the landscape a little.
A subsection of the project is “Tidings: A Protocol of Circulation, Washing Up & Will,” for which he continually takes,
gathers, and re-disperses artifacts found on shores and from people around the region.
“In his quirky way, he’s trying to put a label on it, or
understand it more fully,” Cease says.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2015.
