Andrew Foltz-Morrison

I’m working on a project in Memphis, and Memphis is on the Mississippi River and the Mississippi River goes up 40 feet and down 40 feet. And quite apart from the fact that rivers had been mistreated and tried to be fixed when they’re not a fixed entity—there comes the issue of nature changing all the time and being allowed to change. We are building a public space, with architects, a space that is at the end of Beale Street, and Beale Street is the street of the blues, and at the end of the street of the blues they wanted to create a whole series of platforms, a big platform in which you could have concerts at night, and this is where the Mississippi boats come up and down full of tourists. And the people who come there to go to the bars at night, and they go and see Elvis Presley’s place. So our idea was to put them like trays at different heights, and that at different times of the year some of them would get covered with water.

This is engineered for the plants at each level: these can take a lot of time being in the water, and these less, and these less, and these without it at all. But there’s a change in relationship to the river according to the height. You accept that the river can rise and fall. You accept the constant change of nature. But at the same time your own position within it is that you are at very different viewpoints on the river but always in proximity. So the aim is to see if we can set up a different kind of relationship with the river. That kind of relationship, of being much more intimately tied to the rhythms of the river and being close to it, and seeing all of its moods and changes, seems to me a way of starting to reverse the other take that we had, which was that nature was the other and we simply built walls to protect ourselves from it and fix it.