These photos are from an excellent photo essay my mother sent me months ago. It’s too good to have been sitting in my unpublished posts que for too long. This project touches so many of my interests these days, street performance, building forts, sailing, traveling the world, river pirates. It’s magic!
Wired featured the same photos with more information on the main artist, who calls herself Swoon. It’s worth a look.
Tod Seelie, a friend of Swoon’s, has been on all the trips so far as a crew member and brought his camera to document the creativity and chaos.
“I can only really speak for me,” Seelie says, “And really it’s a combination of things, but I’d say the main point [of the trips] is inspiration. It’s the inspiration we feel and the inspiration other people feel when they come across us.”
They built this ships out of New York City trash and in 2009 sailed them, uninvited, from Slovenia to Venice for the Venice Biennale. Really, my timing is just right. By the time you read this I’ll be sailing down from Slovenia on the A4 autostrada, blasting past Venice to Florence for another seven months of school at Helikos.
