Marronage: Meaning Wild began as a community study of the conceptual and literal construction of wetlands as sites of refuge and resistance—and homes to histories (and possible futures) of cross-cultural care. Small convenings explored the liminal, conventionally inhospitable landscapes – and the pathways, foodways, and formations of kinship they engender. Out of this sensitive environment, an intimate community grew to include a broader network of friends and collaborators, including partners at Montez Press Radio, who joined Rivers Institute for a gathering in New Orleans in November 2024. We understand this broadcast as a partial audio index of places and people in the marshlands of Louisiana and other mirroring environments, where indigeneity becomes an expression of responsibility to the land and its physical and cultural porosity.

For more information on participants and their contributions, please visit: https://riversinstitute.org/events/rivers-x-montez-press-radio-present-marronage-meaning-wild

Marronage: Meaning Wild

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) is a non-profit institute for research and publishing, exhibitions and convenings on art of the global diaspora. Based in New Orleans, Rivers recognizes art as forms of thought shaped by geographic, social, political, environmental, and economic histories and commits to research at the confluence of diverse bodies of knowledge.
Positioned at the Mississippi River’s Delta, at the southern tip of the American South and the upper limit of the Global South, we believe the challenges of the twenty-first century are not hard to see from here. And yet Rivers is not defined by any single place, but rather by a set of conditions. Our perspective, informed by both long-rootedness and displacement, confers us with a reverence for what has long gone unnoticed, what is precarious, and what cannot hold. Rivers carry ideas, goods, and people from place to place. Rivers affirms exchange and estrangement as crucial tools for radical discovery and empathy. We learn from artists who share in this conviction and provide a context and support for their research and practices.

Header credit: Alia Farid, "Chibayish," 2022, Still, Video (color, sound); 24 min 42 s, Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art on the occasion of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It is Kept (6 April - 5 September 2022). Filmed in the southern marshlands of Iraq with Riad Bahrani and Jassim and Qassim Mohammed.

Marronage: Meaning Wild

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought

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