Spy Emerson Reflects On Swimming Cities

photo by Tod Seelie

Writing for Juxtapoz magazine, San Francisco artist and performer Spy Emerson recounts her experiences creating and voyaging on the junk art rafts of “Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea” and “Swimming Cities of Serenissima“.

Both daunting projects were based on Swoon’s giant multimedia floating sculptures, beautiful rafts built from trash. As a group, we made these great, impossible situations happen. For Serenissima, we built junk boats in Slovenia and floated them all the way to [the Biennale in] Venice, Italy — and right into the Arsenal, with the band playing a haunting soundtrack, reverberating off the brick walls. We shook the art elite.

photo by Tod Seelie

Working with the Anonymous Gallery at NYC’s Collective Hardware, Spy also produced a retrospective of these ephemeral vessels, and the crew of over 30 artists and dreamers who labored to bring them into existence: the “Pankabestia” of the Swimming Cities.

“Pankabestia”- what the Italian villagers called us when we floated into town on our junk rafts. It translates to “punk beasts”, and by all accounts we were – magical, grubby, unruly creatures carrying out an enchanted mythical scene, looking like bits of broken dreams, drifting.