At the invitation of Riverlife Sans façon and Steve Gurysh created a public art project as part of the process of reconnecting Manchester and West End Communities to the riverfront, and help inform the process of developing a future work for the West End Bridge Connectors Project. Currently although less than half a mile apart, these two riverside communities are largely physically and socially disconnected from each other and from the river.
The West End and Manchester communities were invited to share a message or statement, something they would like someone downriver to know. These writing were engraved on pieces of driftwood —collected from the Monongahela, Allegheny and the Ohio rivers in collaboration with Allegheny Cleanways Water Crew and Volunteers— and released back in the Ohio to continue their journey downstream.
Given the context of change, the history of both communities and the impending alterations to the West End Bridge, these were expressions of place, statements of fact, a personal narrative, some poignant, playful, intimate or expressive.
These individuals statements of what one person would like others to know collectively build a portrait of a place and time.
I’d like you to know was an opportunity to release a sentiment to the river and the prospect of all the downstream communities who might happen upon them. For Manchester and the West End, it was a gesture of reclaiming of the river for these neighborhoods, as a place of gathering, a place of memory and planting the seeds of an expanded relationship with the Ohio river, its history and associated cultures and with the water itself as it flows onward to the Mississippi and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
