Renée Green
Space Poem #2 (Endless Dreams Triptych), 2009

Renée Green’s multimedia installation Endless Dreams and Water Between explores how desires and dreams have taken shape around islands in literature and history. Colourful banners unfurl across the exhibition space to form the poem There Is No Land Yet, penned by the American poet Laura Riding (1901-1991) when she was living on Majorca in the early 1930s with the British writer Robert Graves (1895-1985).

The principal “narrative” of the video Endless Dreams and Water Between involves four fictional women exchanging letters and thinking aloud about meeting in the imaginary September Institute. George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca (1855) is the running thread linking the four voices. Sand wrote the text while wintering on the island with her children and Frédéric Chopin. It was later translated by Robert Graves. The literary narratives intertwine with Green’s stories, drawing on highly personal archives to weave a web of meaning and sensory connections between places and her fictional characters. The video travels between Manhattan and meditations on Majorca as an island at the crossroads between Europe and the Islamic world, forming a slow, poetic ballet of images. Green has taken particular care over the details of the sites between land and sea and the ebb and flow of the elements that are both real places and loci that let our imagination take flight. The interweaving voices speak of dreams and potentialities to be created. They raise the fundamental question of our relationship with other people’s words and worlds, the history of places and the people who live there as well as the visitors who spin narratives about them, and the multiple migrations that shaped them, their traces embedded in language. The videos without sound act as a counterpoint, completing the installation: Stills presents views of the sites filmed, while Excess presents a succession of Green’s sources, including notepads, maps, and books.