During the run of Cristina Molina’s solo exhibition Tell it to the River at Other Plans, New Orleans, the gallery’s ambience was serene and sacred. The floorspace was emptied, and a five-channel projection wrapped across three walls, with an arrangement of ceramic-framed photographs installed, nearby. The titular work – a film installation that expands on and remixes the artist’s two-channel piece, Miss River (2023), which was exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art last year – meditates on North America’s most significant artery as both a spiritual ecology and a symbol of the hubris of modern society that seeks to tame the wild.
A duo of dancers move in swelling choreographies that embody both the animacy of the natural world and our attempts to harness and exploit it. The river gently laps its waters across a shallow, muddy shoreline, then gathers its fluid body inwards again. It splashes and caresses land masses that jut out to direct its serpentine procession towards a southward delta. At times, the setting sun scatters trails of flickering light across dark water, whose surface is excited by winds that also animate the airy, blue costumes worn by the dancers. One performer raises a swath of textile overhead, and it flaps in the breeze. Another lifts her arms in balletic arcs that sweep into a cradling, protective gesture.
Filmed over a period of two years, the installation assembles footage from multiple visits to the Bywater levee park affectionally known as the End of the World: a nexus of industrial waterways and infrastructure that divert part of the Mississippi River towards Lake Pontchartrain, at times branching out to feed manmade canals that pierce through Bayou Sauvage and towards St. Malo. This place is a site of numerous infrastructural interventions – floodgates and canal locks, surge barriers and levees, bascule and lift bridges – that enable the passage of commercial freight ships and maritime traffic.
New Orleans was built below sea level, on what was once a vast swampland nestled between the river and a brackish lake. This convergence of waterways has long made it a natural meeting place – hence, its Choctaw name Bulbancha, the land of many tongues – although the region is characteristically resistant to settlement, as Indigenous peoples have long understood, on account of cyclic floods, unwalkable wetlands, and damaging, seasonal storms. Yet European colonists sought to initiate an extractive empire, here, and transformed the land for agriculture and urbanization by logging, dredging and damming.
Molina worked with her dancers, Rebecca Allen and Jaeda Barrett, to compose a choreography of gestures that reflect the Mississippi’s own complex movement through this imposed cartography: carrying and diverting, flooding and sinking. Draped in hand-dyed garments designed by Leah Floyd and Renee Johnson, they elegantly personify the river’s dispersed, fluidic spirit. At times, they movein unison: standing side by side, for instance, with heads bowed and forearms retracted towards their cores. Yet they also dance in counterpoint and disharmony. At one point, Allen and Barrett plant their feet in the muddy waters and hold hands as they stretch their arms out in opposite directions, marking a forked path. Throughout the film’s duration, they explore the surrounding biome: they kneel, poised, behind tall grasses, or curl their bodies around gnarled driftwood. They dig their fingers through thick mud in deep, grasping scratches that swiftly disappear beneath pooling water that rises from below.
Tell it to the River subtly addresses the predicament faced by residents of this place: we are burdened by the inescapable knowledge that this city cannot be permanent. Our material culture and built environment are existentially threatened by sea level rise, intensifying hurricanes, coastal erosion and land loss. One day – though we can’t say when – the sense of safety that we have callously engineered will prove insufficient or too costly to maintain. Despite this, the liminal ecosystem draws and compels us against all logic: we recognize something sacred in its semi-liquid ground and heavy air, its resilient megaflora and volatile atmospheric temperament. The film mediates on this precarity with equal parts curiosity and reverence, and seeks to explore what the river might know or desire – before or beyond us.
The exhibition also featured an arrangement of hand-sculpted objects that contain niches for photographic still images printed on aluminum; some are titled for the obstacles we’ve imposed on the river’s movement, such as Divergence or Cross Current. The artist crafted these frames from clay sourced directly at the Mississippi’s shoreline; formed into round, lithic wedges and wobbly, gridded matrices, they almost feel like sigils.
In a published conversation with scholar Astrida Neimanis, Molina explains that she is deeply moved by the deep, geologic memory contained in this material, which represents an accretion of sediment that has been carried and deposited, over millennia, from the river’s entire length. “The clay that I’m using is shaped by water and is also an archive of the water that has all flowed to this one point,” she writes. “That’s why I think it’s so energetically and spiritually charged.” In some of the photographic objects, Molina nestles images of one or both dancers. Others contain abstracted views of only the river’s surface. Perhaps, though, these each capture the same visionary offering: that our bodies – temporary, conscious vessels of water and recycled organic matter – contain this archive, too.