Video Audio Art Installation PASSAGES: MIAMI Examines Journey to Freedom
MIAMI, FL November 2005 -- PASSAGES: MIAMI, a video and audio site installation artwork that examines the emotions experienced while making the journey to freedom, will be held Friday and Saturday, December 2nd and 3rd (during Art Basel weekend) from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., at 626 South Miami Avenue. The intimate work, which will be held in a 50 foot passageway between two buildings, combines video images of the ocean, and the voice of a Cuban woman describing her experience as a child crossing the Florida Straits during the Mariel boatlift, mixed together with an original music composition. The installation is sponsored by Michael Latterner & Associates, The River Oyster Bar and Tobacco Road and is free to the public.
The artwork is the collaboration of two of today’s foremost artists working with video and audio, video artist and Miami native Conrad Gleber and music composer Stella Sung. The video presents two projected ocean and sky scenes rocking up and down and set against each other. The audio is a mixed composition of spoken words and music adapted to create an original composition that conjures up the ironic combinations of beautiful weather and rough waves, hope and fear, and anticipation and doubt.
In PASSAGES: MIAMI, the passageway, a hallway that allows pedestrians to go between a parking lot and the restaurants Tobacco Road and The River Oyster Bar, is an ideal site for the work because the public must pass through the work. Unlike most projected artwork that has the audience sit or stand still, PASSAGES: MIAMI is a five minute loop that ignores a beginning and end. The site enforces the expectation that the audience must not gather and instead, pass-by but still get a sense and feel for the subject. The location is just blocks away from where many Mariel refugees spent their first weeks in America living in camps.
The Mariel Boatlift began twenty-five years ago in April 1980 and ended October 1980. Over 125,000 Cubans came to south Florida from the Port of Mariel, Cuba. The work is dedicated to the people that set out to make the passage.
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