 Bonsoir à tout le monde, bienvenue à ce soir au Moudam pour cette conversation avec l'artiste Zoe Lyonna et qui marque en fait l'ouverture de son exposition El Rio to the River, présentée dans le musée au premier étage. J'ai essayé de parler clairement, mais dans cette merveilleuse nation polyglotte de Luxembourg, je ne pense pas qu'on devrait avoir des problèmes. Je voudrais commencer par filmer cette conversation sur le fait que cela correspond à l'ouverture de l'artiste Zoe. C'est-à-dire que c'est la première en une série d'événements qui ont été programmés par l'équipe publique et de l'équipe curatoriale ici au Moudam. Nous avons notre conversation ce matin, et puis, sur le Saturday matin, à 11 a.m., je crois, il y aura un n'aute-to-be-miste événement, où Zoe sera encore en conversation, mais avec le remarquable Tim Johnson, éditeur et poet, qui est ici avec nous ce matin et qui est l'éditeur du beau livre El Rio, dont vous pouvez voir, je pense, que quand vous laissiez l'auditorium, mais aussi dans l'éditeur du beau livre, et Tim a en fait voyagé tout de suite à Marfa, Texas, pour être avec nous, et il sera en conversation avec Zoe, et aussi aux contributaires pour cet extraordinaire livre, Elizabeth Lebovici et Catherine Facerius, qui sont tous ici avec nous ce matin, et merci. C'est une partie de l'Egg, si vous voulez, et puis l'autre partie de l'Egg est sur le Saturday. Mais il y a, au cours de l'exhibition, un nombre d'événements, lectures, screenings, conversations organisées, et pour vous rapprocher d'un certain nombre d'événements, en mai, Zoe Leonard, scolaire, académique et curateur, qui est renouvelée pour son travail, comme professeur de l'histoire de l'art, mais aussi pour l'exhibition de... Brian Eiffair. Oh, et moi? Oh, je suis désolé. Brian Eiffair. Pardon, je vais commencer. Professor Brian Eiffair, c'est un professeur de l'histoire de l'enseignement de l'Université de l'Université de Londres, qui a récentement créé une expérience remarquable pour Tate London, Tate London on Annie Albers called the Pliable Plane but she's curated a number of remarkable exhibitions over the years. So Bryony will be here in Luxembourg speaking at Moudam then in early May. A symposium, a very impressive symposium has been organised for later in May in collaboration with the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Luxembourg and their Department of Geography and Spatial Planning. Also the Saarland Museum and their Department of North American Literary Studies and the University of Tria and their Centre for American Studies. And the discussion, the subject of that symposium will be on rivers and other border materialities. And then there is, I don't have the full list here but please do go onto the website and look for the programme but an extraordinary film screening series which will include the screening of films by Mexican directors as well as European directors, some American directors. And I believe that there's a radio evening as well that, oh Tim, you have to prompt me. On Wednesday evenings a radio programme of music primarily in Spanish which is listened to on both sides of the border. We take requests and dedication of people in between the both sides of the river and we'll record that if we do live and then we'll play here throughout the museum or stay at least in the context of the already explored on Wednesdays. So that should be really wonderful and you'll hear a little bit more about the importance of music and these songs I think on Saturday from Tim. So first event this evening, next event Saturday. Don't miss it. So I'd like to just begin our sort of precede the conversation with Zoe this evening with a very brief introduction. Who is Zoe Leonard? Zoe Leonard is, I think it's fair to say one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Her work has been the subject of major exhibitions in the United States and in Europe including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Dear Art Foundation, New York, in Europe in the Museum of Modern Art of the Ludwig Collection in Vienna among others. Zoe has also participated in important international exhibitions such as Document 9 in Castle in 1992, Document 12 in 2007. She's also participated in the Whitney Biennials of 1993, 1997 and 2014. And I think it's interesting to understand the significance of these biennial and kin-kenial contemporary art events because Zoe's representation in them also is a reflection of her relevance throughout the last three decades, coming onto four decades. In 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art accorded Zoe a Retrospective Exhibition Survey which subsequently travelled to Alimoka in 2019. So in here we actually have a view. You can recognize the Hudson River there but a view in the Whitney in New York. Known for her monumentally-scaled photographic projects, Zoe has also created sculptural and site-specific installations that have become iconic works of art for the late 20th and early 21st century. And these installations, many of them are to be found in museum collections that include again the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Renaissance here in Madrid and Tate in London. Among the many now iconic moments in her career are, as I mentioned earlier, Document 9 in Castle. And I think we might have a picture where we will go to that. Just here, the Document 9 was curated by the legendary curator Jan Hurt and Leonard was invited to show and she created a work which she installed in Castle's Neue Museum within its collection of 18th-century German portraits with what the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described as chased black-and-white photographs of women's genitals. A reference to Gustave Courbet's famous painting The Origin of the World that manifest the male gaze which feminist art theory holds most art is made for in a way that was shockingly direct, funny and rather beautiful. Leonard took her own New York neighborhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side as a point of departure in the late 1990s for her now iconic project Analog. The work document the work analog documents the eclipse texture of 20th-century urban life as seen in vanishing mom-and-pop stores as they're known in the U.S. and the simultaneous emergence of the global rag trade or textile industry. So we then followed the circulation of recycled merchandise used clothing, discarded advertisements the old technology of Kodak camera shops to far-flung markets in Africa, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Mexico and the Middle East. Conceived over the course of a decade Analog comprises over 400 black-and-white photographs of 5 chapters. Analog is now to be found in the collections of the Rena Sophia Museum in Madrid and also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From the late 80s and through the 90s and 2000s, Leonard embarked on photographic projects addressing landscape, maps and aerial views bringing to them questions of subjectivity and the photographic gaze and the embodied photographic gaze. In 2008, as she presented her conceptual photographic work you see I am here after all commissioned by Dia Bekin in upstate New York comprising some 4,000 vintage postcards and I think you're picking up on this sort of idea of number sourced mostly online and dating from the early 1900s to the 1950s the works repetition of this emblematic site of Niagara Falls an emblematic site of natural beauty and draws attention to the ways in which cultural conventions and artifacts have mapped and defined both the natural world and our understanding of it. Running through many of Leonard's photographic works and installations the themes of journey and displacement I committed activists since the 1980s and into the early 1990s which was an era marked by heightened political awareness of the overwhelming losses to the AIDS pandemic led this era led Zoe to write the manifesto I Want a President in 1992 same year's documenter in support of the poet Eileen Miles presidential bid as an independent candidate alongside George H. W. Bush Bill Clinton and Ross Perrault The piece famously begins with the words I want a dyke for president I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and it goes on. Leonard revisited the text which had begun to circulate widely in the form of a postcard and the text was installed subsequently on a monumental scale on the highlight in New York City at the time of the 2016 presidential election and became a viral sensation on social media I think we have an image of it there Leonard returned to her words on the eve of the 2020 presidential election an event marred by the COVID-19 crisis economic disruption and nationwide demonstrations against institutional racism and police brutality stating and I quote her I am interested in the space this text opens up for us to imagine and voice what we want in our leaders even beyond that what we can envision for the future of our society I still think that speaking up is itself a vital and powerful political act two decades apart I want a president and Al Rio to the river invite us to look closely and from myriad perspectives at the social and political landscape of our times so that we might imagine an ethics of a shared world coming to the work itself Al Rio the exhibition that we are opening this evening is the first presentation of this epic photographic work the work I think I can say currently comprises some 450 photographs of which some 300 are presented in the presentation here in the museum the photographs were taken as Zoe made a journey stopping and starting but travelled along the 1200 mile or approximately 2000 km section of the Rio Grande, a Rio Brava that constitutes the border between or part of the border between les Etats-Unis et les Etats-Unis des Mexicains Mexico donc il commence à El Paso et Ciudad Juarez en Mexico et tourne deux Matamoros où il s'entend en Mexico je pense que c'est intéressant d'en savoir que cette border et la reconnaissance de la border c'est comme en Luxembourg où les terrestres finales et les démarquations du Grand Duché ont été recognisées après le Treaty de Brussels en 1849 les fortifications de la ville dans la seconde partie du XIXe similarly, cette border entre les États-Unis et le Mexique n'était qu'à la fin du XIXe ce que vous verrez c'est une exposition on parle un peu d'aujourd'hui dans les landscapes, les villes, les villes, les villes différentes activités autour de l'agriculture, autour du commerce autour de l'industrie, la police et la surveillance on voit ce que Zoe apprend et s'offre dans sa travail c'est la materialité de la border l'infrastructure, l'environnement mais aussi comme quelque chose qui ne peut pas nécessairement être harné c'est le riz, le riz de la Valle les villes des riz, eux-mêmes on voit le contrôle de l'eau, on voit le contrôle des gens, le contrôle du passage des goûts et on voit aussi les gens vivant leurs vies la vie quotidienne comme Leonard l'a dit, et c'est la dernière quote avant d'entrer dans la conversation je suis en train de regarder le nombre et les pressions complexes qui s'arrêtent sur cette ligne thin de l'eau ce travail est un moyen de penser sur une landscape sociale et politique donc, Zoe qu'est-ce que vous avez commencé ? Hello Hi everybody Thank you so much for being here I actually feel like that was such a beautiful introduction that we're done we can all go home now Thank you That was really beautiful, Suzanne What got me going ? Well there's a long answer and a short answer so I'm going to try to go for the shorter answer Shortly after the election in 2016 I was in west Texas where I spent a lot of time and I had I wanted to I actually didn't want to do street activism I didn't want to go back to doing direct action I wanted to stick with my work and I had spent a lot of time sort of camping and hiking around the Rio Grande Rio Bravo area in the national parks and this one day it occurred to me, I thought if I follow this river this river cuts essentially across section not only through this 2000 miles, 2000 kilometers of land but it gives you a cross section of contemporary society there's climate change issues there's issues of drought and water usage there's histories, the Camino Real intersects so you have a history of the Conquistadors and early colonialism you have farming, you have ranching you have big cities and small villages oil and gas concerns a lot of law enforcement border control immigration and I thought this is what I'm going to do I'm just going to do what I love which is to take pictures and I wanted I had this I wanted to get outside no kind of binary thinking of like democrat and republican black and white us and them, two different countries I wanted to pull out a larger I wanted to understand a larger sense of who we are right now what we're doing, what we've built and a way of examining the border of the country I've lived in my whole life was a way of thinking about our relationship to the rest of the world I know that the process for creating the work in late 2016 involved numerous stages and collaborators could you tell us a little bit about that process yeah, I mean we're going to be here all night but well I began photographing sort of bringing I had a couple of different assistants that helped with the first first few photographic trips but very early on I got into a conversation with Tim Johnson who is now the editor of the book and Tim and I began going out on trips together about a year in, year and a half in and I was still working also with a couple of different assistants at different times but at some point it became really clear that the conversation Tim and I were having that he should be the editor of this book that I had imagined making which was completely not a real thing or even a possibility at that moment but I was somehow convinced we would do it so Tim was a huge collaborator going out shooting together but also having long conversations in these very long truck rides and long walks and long days in the in the sun trying to interpret what we were seeing trying to understand trying to read the landscape and read the built environment which was all new to me sort of understanding how the dams worked how the bridges worked what was allowed what wasn't allowed the kind of really intense surveillance presence along the border and then there have been so Elizabeth and Ketrin who are here were kind of my one of my like centers of gravity we would meet over zoom we would get pictures together and talk about them and refine the ideas and we spoke a lot about Gloria Angeloua and her legacy in terms of Borderlands theory great conversations about how this in fact this set of concerns is not limited to the US Mexico border or the Rio Grande Rio Bravo river but that this set of concerns is something that really is applicable globally questions of how we use our natural landscape and I say the word use really particularly the idea that it's there for us to use that the water is ours to take and our relationship to borders and our relationship to our neighboring countries so I began to think of this as a project that wasn't only about the country I live in but a kind of set of questions that we really face globally at this moment and you had a number of could you talk a little bit about some of the challenges of photographing and being in some of the places you were yeah wow how do I say this so we're talking about a 1200 mile stretch of river I didn't photograph in order I made multiple trips to different places and reading and researching along the way there are sections of the river like through big men national park where there are some challenges like it's it can get really really hot there are snakes there are spiders but it's incredibly beautiful and it feels safe like you really feel like you can move very easily through this beautiful landscape there are other areas where the sense of a heavily militarized security like the law enforcement is very tangible it's very visible and because my charge that I had given myself was to photograph the river I was always trying to get as close to the river as possible and that meant being directly in the zone that was being patrolled so it meant that we had a lot of a lot of contact with law which is not something I was used to as we've spoken about before but I'm not a photojournalist I don't work for a paper I don't have a press pass I wasn't trained as a war photographer I'm an artist from New York and Tim who was going out on a lot of these trips with me as a poet and we were like meh we were like what we said we wanted to do it's a great idea and then you're like do we want to be here right now so that learning how to move in a very, very tense environment where there are very serious operations going on and where there are a lot of heavily armed people and you're the only people that aren't armed and where you're an unknown quantity where you're not quite sure how you're being read that was really tricky and we I say both me and I think Tim and I as we began working more closely together both had an attitude we wanted to strike which was of calm and that we were there to do our work and to be non confrontational but also to never lie about who we were or try to gain access to anything it was really photographing what was in plain sight and what we could access to the limits of what my citizenship would allow me and I never crossed no trespass I never broke a law directly but we were in a zone that was really a gray zone where there isn't a lot of civilian activity a lot of the time so your presence there is not usually welcome and yeah and then there are areas where there's also a lot of illegal activity happening there's narco-trafficking and then I'm moving around with a camera and there are people crossing for various reasons and that really don't want to be seen and I didn't want to I didn't want to engage in any kind of I didn't want to take on a role in revealing anyone or even revealing anyone's face like you'll notice many of the photographs are taken from a distance where you can't really recognize people because it's I don't know what people are doing and I didn't want to make the situation singular or personal I was trying to look at larger structures and how they function so finding maybe the biggest challenge actually of all of it aside from the physical challenges and some of the the tensions around you know that I just described I think for me finding a way and a place to stand a way to kind of to trust my own point of view and really find a way to engage with this place I'm not a Texan I'm from New York but to understand that I had a stake in this that we actually all have a stake in this in understanding our own countries better understanding how how different powers are affecting our lives and so I think it took a couple of years for me to actually really feel like I know I know I'm here and I know how I'm holding my camera and what I'm doing I know the photographs I'm taking and I know all the photographs that I do not want to take because there are so many stereotypes that circulate around migrants, around borders around the American west quote-un-quote around northern Mexico there's such a deep photographic history that is reductive and that is stereotypical and so there were so many things like I'm not taking that picture and really finding my own subjective point of view was a process of discovery so you've talked about El Rio as an epic and in our conversations while we were installing the exhibition you made reference to Homer and the Odyssey Herman Melville and Moby Dick both stories like all epics I guess which were about journeys Could you talk a little bit about how you see the structure of the epic applying to El Rio and how we've actually it's actually been presented here as an exhibition Yeah, that's such a great question I think epic on one hand is a it refers to scale something that's large but it's much more than that it's really an artistic form and like those two works that you just noted and there are also epic works in music there are epic works in all artistic forms but often that kind of size of a story and the form of an epic is sort of positioned around a journey you have a protagonist who for some reason or other has to leave home and the ideas are going to go do this thing and be right back and as they move out into the world proves itself to be a very strange and complex place and more and more things happen and they get further and further away and it gets harder and harder for them to get home and so this is a kind of I think from you know the time of classical Greece this kind of idea of what home means and what the world means and what that the significance of that relationship be it hostile, be it tender be it exciting so I think there's something about the sort of narrative drive of an epic if you could call it that and then if you're making something really big you have to organize it formally and that's an artistic challenge Al Rio well the river the Rio Bravo, Rio Grande is a great subject and I mean that with like the capital G like this is a great subject it's a complex large profound subject but a subject isn't an artwork so having a great I was like oh I've got a great subject yes like I knew I was like this is juicy and I can spend a lot of time with this there's so much to dig into but as an artist you have to make a work that actually functions like it has to stand up it has to work so eventually what I arrived at as you know very well at this point is essentially a three part structure there's a prologue which introduces you to the water itself to this is the element that we're dealing with the movement of the water there's the main body of the work which essentially is located within the realm of black and white documentary photography it moves around with different historic references to 19th century to 20th century work but it's that and then there's a prologue a coda which switches into digital photography and kind of examines their iPhone photos taken off a screen and really ask questions about surveillance and about some of images that we now all live within that we all have in our pockets right now and that image making now is really about a screen so I wanted to really also think about the history of photography and how photography is not only a means that records history but photography actually is an actor in history how the world is framed how it's represented the images that circulate help form our perceptions of the world and thus it affects our politics it affects our social attitudes so the kind of the really hard work of it it's about finding a way to hold this all on the wall here these single images sequences of images finding a rhythm and a pace that would allow this really complex subject to unfold in a way that would welcome the viewer and would allow you to feel some agency as you moved around in it but there's also this idea of stories within stories within the story as well and there are moments there are rooms or sequences which are they are sort of narrative stories that join the bigger story of the river and you keep the river as your as your guide like the physical river all the way along I just wanted to maybe talk a little bit about the idea of time I mean the big subject of course there's a time it took to make the work but not just shooting the photographs but also printing the work I mean the time of production the time of the studio the time of the photographs in their nature the way that you were talking about as a sort of as a not an antidote but a resistance to the way we consume images now through the screen or the viral feed and the time when you began making it was of course the time of the Trump administration which was a I think a trigger of sort of background but you've also talked about your interest in Luxembourg and how while the work was made in a particular moment in time historically it is speaking to other contexts which I would agree with but would you like to say something about that well I'll go back to our first conversation about this when you invited me to show this work here a number of years ago now and you I said you know Luxembourg like what a curious place to premiere this work and I'd never been here and you said you know actually it's a city that's on a river and you said the museum is built on this you know the footprint of this fortification it's a country that has three borders hundreds of thousands of people that cross everyday for work and for other and and as you were talking I was like oh what a perfect place actually for all the reasons I said before about how this is really these are shared concerns around the globe coming here to Luxembourg and now we've been here about three weeks installing the work and preparing and for today and in free time we've taken these long walks my studio manager sitting right over there and Suzanne and I took a number of really long walks around the city and you always find yourself on a rampart you know there are fortifications and ramparts and walls and left over so this the idea of the walled city and the idea of the wall the ideas of borders and walls are not new and although a lot of border wall or border fence building in the US was ramped up during the Trump administration and it was much more aggressively addressed in the media and much more spoken about a lot more in fact borders and fences have been built along the US Mexico on the US side of the US Mexico border for many many years and so I think there's a kind of paradox somewhere in the work too that I wanted to acknowledge and examine some of the damage that was done during those four years of administration but also to acknowledge that this is part of a much longer time frame and that the river itself has its own sovereignty it's been present for millennia from long before humans were around and then human habitation human civilization on the river around the river allowed for human civilization a source of water in a desert so all of those different kinds of time the conquistadors the colonial history there are these layers and layers of time that in a certain way you think if we're not going to look really carefully and really honestly at our situation things are not going to get better like there's a kind of inevitability when you start uncovering some of the other the historic moves that predate the Trump administration what you're saying to is so about how we can't just sort of point to one particular moment and say it all started there and I think the photographs that you've taken and the views that you've taken also look to say this is a much much longer history and in fact it underpins where we are or where we've got to now but I love in the book too there's a brilliant writer of CJ Alvarez who is one of these he's one of these writers he's a scholar but you kind of fall in love with him when you read his writing there's something about intelligence but the simplicity and the humanity of it but I was really struck where he talked about these different times of the rivers the prehistoric time the geological time the political time it's a very beautiful text that's in the book this notion of time is extremely important but it leads us in and through your work the way you've worked with that and tried to capture the river as time I think it invites us precisely to begin reflecting about actually how did we get here ultimately what might we do to rethink that in terms of the exhibition itself you took the decision as you did for the book indeed or for the image volume of the book because the book is in two volumes image volume and a text volume took the decision to not include any wall texts or labels that identify the places where you were shooting how might someone visit encountering the work in the exhibition how might they situate what's going on in front of them it's another really great question and actually before I answer it I wanted to actually do a shout out to Marcos Corrales who's here who is the architect and exhibition designer we worked with upstairs for us to flow the photographs through so thank you Marcos but yes to your question about the captions well about the wall text in a way it was something I had been running around in my head from the very beginning you know what would that wall text be how much information do I give and in a way because the book had to go to print before we hung the exhibition I kind of answered that in the book I started I didn't let's see I didn't want people to feel completely lost I didn't want there to be a sense of information being withheld I didn't want it to feel obtuse or impossible to understand as I started thinking about the captions in the book and how to name these different photographs I was like well do I use the English name do I use the Spanish name do I use a historic indigenous name do I use the latitude and longitude do I use the direction I'm pointing my camera do I and I realized each system of naming indicated a system of message that would then be giving authority to one form of authority over another form of authority and then I thought well I'll say it's taken from here looking at this and they got really complicated and and then I eventually came around to thinking you know how helpful is it for someone in a European audience to use the word Matamoros or the word Brownsville or the word Laredo what's that going to tell them and I thought well the photographs themselves black and white photography especially can have a diagrammatic quality it describes the world to you it draws it out for you can the photographs do this without the caption and it's less from my perspective it's less important for a viewer to know exactly where this photograph was taken then to consider a situation this is a situation where kids and families are swimming opposite a dam and a barbed wire fence this is a situation where goats are grazing under a bridge this is a situation where border patrol agents are searching a bank do you need to know exactly where that bank is I don't think that actually gets you there a number of the photographs also contain text and I left in some of those photographs as I was editing so you would for those who wanted to really locate themselves there are a number of points where there is a sign or a historic marker where you can go right up to the photograph and read that historic marker and locate yourself or there may be there is signage or other indications so at some point we had been Joseph Logan miraculously talented beautiful collaborator who designed the book he was like ok Zoe we really got to get on those captions now we got to start feeding the titles and I I was just like you know what I just think the book is right without it let's just let the language of photography speak and to recognize that each spoken or written language has its own order and that photography too the language of depiction the language of photographic depiction has its own lexicon of scale, of tone of grain of light, of shadow, of framing and just like trust that that can be legible to people that the photographs will actually do their own speaking so it was kind of like a move I was like well this really might not work but it felt worth trying yeah and one more thing on the book I think Nicola van Velsen just left but our wonderful publisher from Hadjicons was here a moment ago and worked so closely with all of us to make this book possible it was a kind of an impossible book we made actually but we made it speaking of the book and thinking about the book and what you were explaining about inviting people to make their own sense of what they were seeing through both the pacing of the selection of images the pacing of them in space and in time but also through your use of the language of photography and that historic language of photography like using it but also undoing it, reframing all of these things I mean I think of it in terms of like as a kind of poetry or poetics and I loved the fact that in the editor's notes for the book Tim himself again I'm sorry we keep quoting you but you're such an essential part of this project but just to quote Tim Johnson he says poetics for me signifies the interplay of making and un making and applies to the temporal character in the formal structure of any work of art and it's like the most beautiful encapsulation of what is happening with your work we sort of covered a lot of things I'm conscious that you need to see this exhibition but a couple of quick questions for you Zoe if you can bear it you've talked a lot about photography as a medium and you've been an avid student of photography you really know what it is to make a photograph and the exhibition itself as Zoe mentioned earlier constitutes a sort of corpus of around 300 black and white silver gelatin photographs hand printed by master printer Laurent Girard Laurent, France via New York via LA and a series of colour c-prints which is the prologue and then a series of digital prints which forms the coda of the exhibition a kind of epilogue or coda in terms of the tripartite structure and I was so we talked about how we had worked for so long on this exhibition because of Covid we were working at a distance and with my co-curators Christophe Galois and Sarah Bourmor and with our colleagues Deborah Lamberlès and Clarice Fatman here on the publication with Hydra Kanz and Tim and Joseph we would be looking at sort of things on the screen and we could get a sense of the stunning aspect of the images and their textures and Zoe would send me messages on my screen I can really tell they have this incredible depth of focus and texture but when because we paced out all of the exhibition working with printouts, digital printouts so I sort of mapped it all out and had a few crazy few meltdown moments which was part of any installation but when the real prints the Silver Gelatin prints came out it was absolutely amazing I mean I remember almost sort of falling backwards I was so stunned by their physical presence and insistence sort of absolutely remarkable things but all of that sort of lead into Coda which of course is at the end and Coda as in well the work has finished but there's just one more thing so could you tell us talk to us about Coda and its significance in El Rio yeah and in terms of the print quality yeah this I worked in the darkroom I did my own darkroom work for 25 years but now I work with a couple of master printers so the black and white is Laurent Girard and the color is Eric Weeks and actually Coda was printed by her very own Jocelyn Davis in the studio in a quick there was a little format change and we had to reprint something on the fast so they wouldn't look this good if it weren't for the brilliance of those master printers and the length of our relationship like we it's not like oh you just drop them off and pick them up and they're done it's a whole really involved conversation about what I want out of the photograph and Laurent will show me something it's a back and forth it's a really long process to arrive at we were printing we're actually in production for 16 months we were printing and I mean we're talking prints for that entire 16 months it was a really yeah it's I think not a lot of people really print that way anymore you know it's but anyway I just wanted to sort of give that fill that out a little bit of like why those prints look so good like those color flowers like that's Eric Weeks you know Coda the work also very late the idea was really the prologue and then this you know from El Paso down you know what is all the way down to the gulf and then when you get to the mouth and you the river pours out into the gulf of Mexico my intention was to end the work there at some point I thought like that's possibly romantic ending to this it's you know the beauty of the ocean and I mean you can't take a bad picture of the ocean it's just you know it's really cinematic it's really film responds to that condition really well and I thought you know this is such a kind of thing that we do in our society where we like look to the ocean to solve all our problems oh just walk along the beach you have some garbage throw it in the ocean we just sort of look to the ocean to solve all of our problems to take all of our problems and in art it is always asked to stand in for the eternal and the endless power and it's you know the subject that goes back to the very beginnings of art making and I thought well it's really beautiful and I want to have that moment and allow the beauty of this moment this river arriving in to the Gulf which means that then it's connected to the Atlantic which means it's then connected to the rest of the world that feels like a powerful and important moment but I think there's a kind of meta space that Coda provides a couple of years into the project before one trip or another I was researching one of the bridges and I just wanted to know when it was built and what was that crossing going to look like I've Google driven that whole drive I can't tell you how many times like how many 3 a.m. I'm like let me just Google drive through Laredo it's like complete lunacy but I discovered that when I went to research this bridge that they had a website and that on the website you could on a link that took you to a quote unquote bridge cam and which is an open stream of a camera showing people crossing back and forth and in some cases showing traffic the ostensible use of this is that if you want to cross from one side to the other you can go to this website and see how long of a wait is it how crowded is this bridge this is common practice all over the world now given the kind of heated intense situation at the U.S. Mexico border the idea of that kind of surveillance although it was supposedly benign because it's just about checking how long you have to wait at the border I thought this is very strange that I can be sitting in my apartment in New York or wherever and that I can be watching people passing, going to work, going to school and I became really obsessed with these cameras and I started I mean when you're not streaming junk on like Netflix you might as well watch a bridge cam for five hours you know so I started watching them and I was like you know I think this has a place I think this has a place in the work and I don't know what it is so I just whenever I don't know what to do with something I just start taking pictures of it because that's like how I figured out so I started photographing and but the analog pictures they just weren't right and eventually when I was dealing with this question of the end I thought oh there's this other step which is about a digital space it's about a meta space of how what happens at our borders and what we agree to in our governments in those situations does not remain cited there it's not going to stay at the border it's part of this stream of information and it's also I think it's a metaphor for the way that the attitudes and the behaviors that we accept at our borders reflect who we are as a people and in fact they come home with us they follow us home so how you treat your neighbor that's you know it follows you home and so I thought that the structure wise to give the viewer this moment of like we've got the mouth we're at the ocean it's glorious it's beautiful and then like oh there's this one other room that talks about this the conceptual space that we all occupy together that has to do with with governance with information with surveillance with the image world that we all live in with questions of privacy with questions of citizenship and so it felt like a really important way to also they're in color I shot them with my iPhone and I had been shooting them for a couple of years but I reshot them all what's on the wall here was all shot in one day September 27th by chance in September this last fall so you can see people wearing masks I wanted to bring the work like right up into the here and now black and white and you know over time this will be dated but it will be dated to a certain moment in time black and white photography can feel oddly timeless here's this the 70's this the 19th century and these you know right when we are and I thought there's a couple of photographs you can actually read the name of the website I wanted to be really transparent about what it was that this is my laptop this is the screen feed and this is what we're watching we're watching people going to school and going to work yeah it's just sort of in closing just to say that this again as I began with the sharing with you this is the very first time that Al Rio has been presented to the world as a work and as an exhibition so and it will subsequently travel to the museum of modern art in Paris we're delighted to have the curators of the exhibition, the presentation in Paris there and they have been absolutely vital partners with Moudam on the preparation and the production of the exhibition and of the book but for you Zoe I mean thinking about your previous epic photographic works you know is this the final form stay tuned I think with that maybe that's a good moment to close we need some suspense and I think you know just to allow you to visit the exhibition and thank you for coming I think will you join me in thanking Zoe Leonard for being here