Gather, Press, Release

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 field of relations, with the museum understood as a site within its ecological, social, and cultural circulation.

The estuary is shaped by encounters among species, people, economies, and landscapes, where lives, movements, and histories meet and alter one another. Gather, Press, Release operates as a score for working in this field. MarinMOCA’s galleries become a provisional workshop where artists, scientists, students, and local community members work through papermaking, boatbuilding, and civic imagining. Plant matter, recycled fiber, and water are gathered, pressed, and released into sheets of paper. The paper becomes part of Floating Forest, a multi-sited work-in-progress by artist and architect Marisha Farnsworth and Futurefarmers’ Amy Franceschini, which envisions a fleet of seaworthy wood and paper vessels moving through the Bay. 

Alongside the workshop, a speculative civic office, Temporary Office of Bay Relations, takes shape as an outpost for estuarine thought, listening, and writing. From here, the score unfolds into the San Rafael Creek Watershed and outward into the Bay. The opening of the presentation will also mark the release of a field guide to the San Joaquin River, a major tributary of the Bay. After the presentation closes in San Rafael, the project continues to Oakland, where the score will continue in a different part of the estuary.