'Voyage' (2011) was a live-action piece that took place within a public setting on the Maltese coastline. A cube of dimensions 160cm on each side was constructed out of common-place packaging materials, namely plywood and insulating materials such as polystyrene, that were found on-site. This waste which often gets washed up as flotsam on local shores, generated as a by-product of the aquaculture, fishing and shipping industries. It is also testament to the cross-national movement of people in the Mediterranean, alluding to wider politicised social concerns outside of a local context. Since the stories of such travellers often go unheard and unattested, I wished to utilise the notion of these material by-products as 'witnesses' to the lives of the people who came into contact with them.
The trajectory of the floating material, initiated by human action but propelled by natural forces, also becomes a sort of voyage - one that speaks more to a sense of loss as opposed to the reconciliatory heroic voyages of antiquity. I constructed a floating vehicle or vessel in the shape of a cube - a standardised and regular form with modernist connotations - whose dimensions were designed to fit around those of the body of the voyager, in this case my own body.
The utopian ideals of the modernist myth are challenegd by the cube's inefficiency as an agent of motion. Sitting within the cube, the voyager is at once trapped and protected by the confines of the vessel, and unable to alter or chart any sort of meaningful course or direction. In this state of suspended motion other stimulants such as light and sound are also reduced, leading to a quietly contemplative state.
In this manner, I floated within the cube for a distance of approximately 4km and a period of around 2 hours, until the vessel washed up ashore and was stranded. This action was also documented through a number of preparatory sketches and photographs.
