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RECREATE / an island river meeting

After a 50-year stint as industrialized riverside, Hall's Island is an island once again, through spectacular effort. Want to paddle out and see where contemporary conservation and recreation meet?

Coffee House Press and the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO) invite you to a "meeting on the river" with interdisciplinary poet Moheb Soliman. This June and August, creative guided excursions will take place from North Mississippi Regional Park to Hall's Island, using public Paddle Share kayaks, free of charge.

Trips will be creative and critical engagements with environment, self, and others, through quietude, observation, and discussion as well as poetic and performative presentation and interaction. Depending on conditions, trips will also feature landing at MWMO and Hall's Island itself to experience it firsthand. Participants will also receive a special "as is" edition of Moheb's work about Hall's Island as a keepsake of this uniquely used, recycled, renewed place between the natural and cultural.

DETAILS

There will be four trips: Friday, June 8 from 12-3 p.m.; Sunday, June 10 from 2-5 p.m.; Friday, August 10 from 2-5 p.m.; and Sunday, August 12 from 2-5 p.m. For June 8, contact Moheb directly at [email protected]. Otherwise RSVP at https://doodle.com/poll/n7yd7xizcup76k2y

12 people max/trip. Solo and double kayaks available—sign up for preference. Accommodations can be made on-site to pair up more experienced with more novice paddlers as the group sees fit.

Comfort with paddling, water, and physical flexibility are necessary, but no special skill or fitness. Trips will be slow and easy going, down-river one way for 3.9mi. Each trip will have a National Park Service ranger in attendance as official safety and paddle guide. But be prepared for some wetness!

Meet at North Mississippi Regional Park—5116 N Mississippi Dr, Minneapolis, MN 55412. Return transportation provided—a free Niceride bicycle or carpool.

Participants will sign standard Paddle Share liability waivers extending to Coffee House Press, MWMO, and Moheb Soliman.

In the event of bad weather, an email will be sent out two hours before start time.

BACKGROUND This project is an extension of Moheb Soliman's fall 2017 residency with the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization through Coffee House Press' In the Stacks program. During, he studied watershed documents, maps, digital archives, new plans and videos, and other materials related to the history and transformation of Hall's Island, as well as meeting engineers, conservationists, and public officials involved. The project and residency explore the relationship between recreation and conservation in our time; the complex measures we're compelled to go to in order to "save" and manage nature; and the value of bringing together artists with other professionals in working with environmental issues.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose work deals primarily with nature, modernity, identity, and belonging, often through text-based performance, installation, and public art. In recent years, he's explored these themes through the site of the Great Lakes region and borderland. See more about his work at mohebsolimansoliman.info.

For questions contact [email protected] or [email protected]. This project is presented by Coffee House Press through their In the Stacks program, coffeehousepress.org, and made possible through the Stewardship Fund grant of the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, www.mwmo.org, with community support from the Arab American arts organization Mizna, mizna.org.

#moheb soliman #coffee house press #mwmo #chpinthestacks

In the Stacks with Moheb Soliman: Part 3

During his fall 2017 residency with the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, Moheb Soliman studied watershed documents, maps, digital archives, new plans and videos, and other materials related to the history and transformation of Hall’s Island to explore the relationship between recreation and conservation in our time; the complex measures we’re compelled to go to in order to “save” and manage nature; and the value of bringing together artists with other professionals in working with environmental issues. Moheb is leading four guided excursions along the Mississippi River as the culmination of his CHP in the Stacks residency and will share notes, musings, and letters from his residency here over the next several weeks.

#chpinthestacks #moheb soliman #mwmo #artist residency #writing #coffee house press

In the Stacks with Moheb Soliman: Part 2

Hi old Philly planner,

Do you already know all this? Would make sense--the overlap's why I'm writing you... So you don't have to read this. And since I know you won't ever read this I'll skip the niceties... I was given as background this 191pg publication titled Historic Waters of the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization. It's a thorough primer stuffed with maps on all significant surveying ever mounted about the hydrology of the Minneapolis area, which basically defines MWMO's territory. I wish you could see all the images I poured over, the symbologies and aesthetics and projections, a relentless editorial of mapping. I found myself enthralled with one particular section that presented the sort of genesis of all of this technical knowledge, upon which everything would be built and rebuilt- from old St. Anthony Falls to the new Hall's Island. There was the original Public Land Survey map there to peruse, but the enthralling thing was the minutiae of its operations—how it came to be. The labor seems so spectacularly monotonous and tough going. Just take a long look at this, particularly the numbered part:

How could anyone have possibly managed this? Executed all this well and proper enough to give us all we have to work with now? To give us power over so much, places and people, with such basic physical but abstract mathematical labor. If only this colossal effort could be evoked somehow—surfaced, demonstrated, displayed. Restaged... what a performance that would be. Only because it's useless now, or redundant. Today's surveyors and planners are of course still at the same fundamental business, but with better tools (though that always spurs harder tasks), and layers and layers of surveys beneath them. That's heavily what a place is now- its plan. We inhabit your plan, at every and you bury it around every city bend and river corner... "2. The kind and diameter of all 'bearing trees' with the course and distance of the same from their respective corners; and the precise relative position of WITNESS CORNERS to the true corners."

Why the caps... an emphatic centering of a pair of scheming eyes in the landscape, or a caution, alarm, about the incalculable gap?

#moheb soliman #chpinthestacks #artist residency #mwmo #maps #archives #coffee house press

Announcing our next CHP In The Stacks residency

During October and November, Minneapolis-based poet Moheb Soliman will take part in a month-long residency inside the offices of the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO) and at the site of a future park at historic Hall’s Island.

This spring, a particular project near the artist’s home in northeast Minneapolis caught Soliman’s eye. MWMO is partnering with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) on its effort to effort to turn the area known as Hall’s Island, which was augmented and connected to the river bank as industrial property in the 1960s, back into an island. The undertaking calls for excavating a new river channel and creating both a rich natural habitat and a public park. Among the proposed amenities are a beach, boat rental, and a cafe pavilion.

While much of Soliman’s recent creative work has revolved around themes of nature, identity, and modernity around the Great Lakes region, this will be his first project centered on the Mississippi River. He will spend time over five weeks in MWMO’s riverside office working alongside a team of engineers, planners, designers, and educators who will provide access to resources, including books, maps, digital archives, and more.

“My interest lies in the incredibly elaborate work we do in managing and shaping the natural world, and the intersections and tensions in our time between recreation and conservation,” said Soliman. The poet hopes to create new work from the residency to be presented in the future at the site and in collaboration with MWMO.

Stay tuned for dispatches from Moheb’s time at MWMO and on the river.

#moheb soliman #chpinthestacks #chpintheparks #mwmo #mississippi river #watershed #Library Residency Program

My postures so bad I slouch in my sleep

#mwmo

In the Stacks with Moheb Soliman: Part 5

Hello stranger,

I’ve been living in Tulsa this year through a fellowship—so different from up north as to be possibly exotic, however plain. Come and visit. I’m groping here still at ideas about recreation and conservation (neither which have much traction here at all) and I wish I’d read my Foucault better; seems like it could catalyze so much. His work affected me so thoroughly back then, though I could barely dig in–just a touch floored me. And so cool-headed as to be chilling. I know you won’t ever read this, so let me just be formal with you, stranger.

There is a burgeoning injunction in our time: Recreate

As human impact on the environment grows in tandem with our awareness and ability to protect it, we’re pushed to elaborately manage the countless natural spaces and other dilapidated areas we’ve come to occupy and take into our purview. Environmental stewardship is no longer conservation away from people, especially as our population continues to rise and migrate, and “green living/cities/tourism” become mainstream models for living, with sophisticated infrastructure to realize and capitalize on them. From the proliferation of urban parks in reclaimed industrial zones to time-honored national parks in the heart of nowhere, the scheme is to regulate spaces where people can recreate, as a way of keeping our species from altogether ruining the natural sphere beyond the damage we already fear and deny we’ve done. We recognize our capacity to be toxic, rampant, careless—destructive even in loving the non-human living world.

Recreate, lest you destroy

In Foucault’s line of theorizing the concepts of “biopolitics” and “biopower,” the modern state has become responsible for controlling and supporting the bodies of its populations—the biological life of our species. This manifests through systems governing healthcare, fertility, immunization, genetics, food, pollution, and much more. Governments are charged with life, and act on this mandate through diverse socio-political mechanisms. Recreation may well be an evolution of these biopolitics, where the state is required to put nature on life-support in order to support its subjects- and its object- on earth. Even in this regressive current moment, there are still campaigns at every level of government and through grassroots channels all across the country promoting recreation as the future of conservation. We require mass buy-in to afford, for example, miles of railways retrofit for hiking and biking, or vast stretches of riverfront cleaned and sculpted for kayaking and canoeing, in order to then allow for local plant and animal re-wilding, migration corridors, watershed rehabilitation, or other resurgences of the non-human living world that are envisioned in turn to extend our existence. Of course, encounters with wilderness can be beautiful and profound; recreation healthy and recuperative; and conservation self-evidently valuable beyond resource management. Only, their intersection speaks volumes to contemporary relationships with nature and its ceaseless handling, presentation, and re-creation.

Re-create

As dozens of cities like Minneapolis and even Tulsa redevelop from the inside out, modern recreation is also everywhere further elaborated into and subsumed by all we do. It implicates players like Coffee House Press, or the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, but beyond art crawls and public events as recreational activities to having artists and art practices increasingly permeate non-arts spaces, like environmental organizations, or outdoor recreation spaces, like MWMO, and Hall’s Island, or the Gathering Place here in Tulsa—the largest most expensive privately funded public park in American history, ready now for installation proposals. Artists are everywhere brought in under a sometimes paradoxical imperative: Re-create. It is an artist’s job (if they’re lucky) to create what is for many a recreational activity—art. To represent/re-present myriad aspects of life and especially those with some current traction and tension, as the environment has singularly come to be.

I consider myself a nature poet, but in our time, this requires dwelling in the ideas above. This Hall’s Island project, from an initially observational residency to leading an extremely experiential culminating program, in a way encapsulates the move from knowledge to power and swearing to the “biopolitical injunction to recreate.” I too, like you, stranger, conscript all of society to order and sustenance, especially where nature is concerned.

Recreate: in the injunctive mood

Watch a time-lapse video of the construction of Hall’s Island:

https://public.earthcam.net/MississippiWMO#/Island%20Project/Camera%201/View%201/timelapse

#mwmo #moheb soliman #artist residency #chpinthestacks #writing

In the Stacks with Moheb Soliman: Part 4

+810' Unusually warm and sunny evening Back at island

Dear diary, Mo and I went running again and he hardly spoke to me. But it seems like all we can do together's work out. I know you won't read this... We haven't been communicating really He left to wait for the cable guy but I wanted to stay out. It's so nice here. They keep it mixed, mowed and overgrown, and birds I've never seen before. And no one's ever around Why very much just Redbox and salad bar nights. We did our routine for an hour and 40min today, he wore the white

which bothered me,

It's black. All black, or hot brown Things have to change He just hovered there while we stretched like he wasn't with me. And it was just us there in our own worlds Forgot my sunglasses so I just closed my eyes and watched his feet like, ripple in my mind like little eddies like little water bugs on this I think it's bamboo which is good for dogs and babies. Eddy

I saw that drone again dunno who's. Seriously whose- The city? Checking on their work? Police? Perving? On the park But we were all alone except And now just me, I just got a chill, and it's so amazingly hot Mohammed's paternity leave was still not over but he told me he just cut it short starting next week. I mean what the hell else are we supposed to do And they're gonna start sensitivity training So much for that Each in our own world except there were these birds pecking at all these broken eggshells in the dirt,

Baby turtles, I dunno? That sucks. But I think so. Little baby turtle just like in an egg with its head tucked out, why do I have to think about that

* * *

+808.5' +808.5' ~6PM Dear son I see Walking on water as a youth He would have been a water god, adoring the fresh air fish breathe springing beaver feet in muddy ribbons filtering the River of Fraying Butts Letting the bread slide, lover of goose They would have put his symbols ~ ~ ~ on this symbolic of lighthouses lighthouse of nothing A torch with an opaque flame Light that can't see out A sign with no anchor Light that is trapped in. I'm still standing here looking in immaculate sun for the eye in the pyramid Cryptic He would have been reborn here a kin to the island He would have made this place his home. His friends would have to come see him here and only here. Here they hire magicians for birthdays here they have money for second lives this river Here kids are believing water is alive and free I see him walking in place forever, floating in place forever beyond the reeds, blushing into oblivion like a brown paper bag borne on this Nile. I live on and so does my cottonwood woodpecker delighting son. Here's a monument for love and recreation Here's a hollow body fixed in burning light. I like the man in the sun

* * *

+808.5' → 4% Late day again Taking the stroller out even though Mo would be livid. Pretty nuts actually I know. Maybe I'll ditch it in the bushes this time. Dump it in the channel. Shit. I just... really did like the weight of it for running. It was perfect. I could lean into it and just go around the island and over the bridges and circle back for like an hour and just look at kiddo, it just felt good. It just feels so good to run. Mo said he can't run anymore with his joints. Right. He's trying standing exercises. Like just standing, in the sun. I tried it, it's pretty dramatic actually. To see your shadow move around you, and the stroller shadow starts to come out like a baby bump. That part gives me the hot chill. And I see that drone again. I must look crazy. In the hot brown microfiber top purple with sweat in the dramatic sun looking for my little kiddo deep in the barrel of a mute gray 2yo stroller. Shit. He could've just grown old in a wheelchair and I would've pushed him around all his life and been perfectly happy to do it all my life. We could've brought him down to this place for the rest of our lives, he was always asking for it, like there wasn't cottonwood and woodpeckers anywhere else. He loved the lighthouse I guess. The second we'd cross over he'd be wagging his finger at it, like a caterpillar, like a- pupae, sign said, repopulated, back home. A moth in his hand, making holes. And he'd be squealing, squealing. I like this island at sunset, when it gets dark first, before the land, the world behind it, it was a part of it, till a couple years ago.

#moheb soliman #chpinthestacks #artist residency #writing #mwmo #coffee house press

In the Stacks with Moheb Soliman