Photos
Ricky Yanas, Sarah Kavage

ARC is a sculptural boat built in collaboration with Aymara artist Aymar Ccopacatty, using Aymara reed boat building techniques. The Aymara people, located in Peru and Bolivia around Lake Titicaca, build boats, houses, and entire floating islands out of Totora reed! Aymar is based in Rhode Island and was generous enough to share his cultural knowledge of building reed boats for this project. Ccopacatty is known for his weavings that use the ubiquitous modern material - trash! - largely recycled plastic bags collected from his homeland of Peru.

The creation of this boat brought together a variety of materials across space and time — contemporary and traditional, near and far. Because the locally-harvested and invasive Phragmites reed does not float like the Totora reed, we used hundreds of recycled laundry detergent bottles in the center of the structure. This technique is also sometimes used by the Aymara people in modern times.

We wanted to create something that could be prompt dialogue about the movement of plants and people, climate change, environmental degradation and waste, climate migration, colonization, and solidarity between peoples across the Americas.

Artist Miguel Horn was commissioned to lead youth from immigrant rights organization Juntos in creating their own artwork in response to ARC. Their drawings of the boat were CNC cut into woodblock prints, which were then used to make various prints - including the large banner backdrop for the boat.

 <<< END >>> (you made it! This was the final project!)
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