Gather, Press, Release: A Score for Bay Relations

Gather, Press, Release: A Score for Bay Relations brings the ongoing work of artist collective Futurefarmers and independent curator Devon Bella into the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. The presentation is part of Becoming Estuarine, an extended artistic and curatorial inquiry that approaches the San Francisco Bay Estuary as a living web of interdependencies, with the museum as a site within its ecological, social, and material circulation. Understood as part of these relations, MarinMOCA’s galleries become a provisional workshop, unfolding through three interconnected activities: papermaking, boatbuilding, and civic imagining.

Within the workshop, plant matter, recycled fiber, and water are gathered, pressed, and released into sheets of paper, becoming a tactile record of local histories. It also houses early iterations of Floating Forest, a multi-sited work-in-progress by artist and architect Marisha Farnsworth and Futurefarmers’ Amy Franceschini, that envisions a fleet of seaworthy vessels across the Bay Estuary. Over the course of the exhibition, a wooden boat frame from Floating Forest will be clad in paper that is collectively produced on-site, eventually joining with the watershed.

Alongside the workshop, a speculative civic office entitled Temporary Office of Bay Relations functions at MarinMOCA as space for dialogue, bringing together students, scientists, activists, writers, and poets to reimagine and develop a new field guide to the San Rafael Creek Watershed.