Southwind

In 2019, artists Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep undertook a journey of several months on the Mississippi, from north to south. Their intention was to cross the United States along its most important waterway, brimming with life and marked by history, but also by abuse: from racism, unemployment and poverty to monoculture through to pollution. Along the river, they shot images of their encounters, also documented by sketches and notes in their logbook, but also collected many varieties of cereals, with the aim of later making the famous ‘moonshine’ alcohol, very popular during prohibition.

A story that this book tells for the first time in its entirety, in words and images, with the help of testimonies, photographs and drawings, as well as essays signed in particular by the French film critic Antoine de Baecque.

The project has already been presented as an installation at HISK Open Studios and, through an educational program, at the Center Pompidou in 2019. It was the subject of a homonymous film, the premiere of which took place in NOLA – acronym for ‘New Orleans, Louisiana’ – in January 2022, and recently a theatrical event, first performed in Ljubljana in May 2022, then in Utrecht. In their socially engaged and cross-disciplinary performance-based practice, the two artists track down issues lurking beneath the shimmering surface – often water: in 2015 they once worked together at Hogshead 733, restoring an old wreck and traversing the Channel with it, not without difficulty, until reaching Scotland, where they transformed the planks of the boat into wooden barrels to distil whiskey there.