The Meditation Boat

ANN HAMILTON presents The Meditation Boat

During her first visit to the city in August 2005, she was struck by the flow of the Mekong River, which became for her “a visual embodiment and confluence of cultural currents, where a traditional past mixes with the modern present.” She also visited four monasteries in the forests surrounding the city, each of which included a long, narrow building designed specifically for walking meditation. Inspired by these structures, she decided to design a boat for spiritual meditation by the monks and novices of Luang Prabang. The architects Laurent Rampon and Yushi Kawaguchi, along with Jean-Pierre Cuomo, refined her designs, and the boat builder Sichan Phongsavath and his team at the boatyard in Luang Prabang built the vessel. The boat was blessed in a ceremony at the stairs of Vat Xieng Thong on the Mekong, on October 9, 2006, by Phra Acharn One Keo Sitthivong, five monks, and three novices as well as more than fifty participants.

"Our physical bodies are repositories for cultural knowledge and memory inherited, repeated, and passed down through generations. The role of an artist is often to address specific actions and processes through which this cultural knowledge is physically embodied. It can be recognized in the quotidian rhythms and patterns of walking, sewing, weaving, or writing—patterns that in their familiarity can become invisible or lost when not perceived. How can art help us attend to what is becoming lost or eclipsed under the pressures and force of a globalized world? How can an artwork participate in local and daily traditions and help us to see ways in which such rhythmic patterns of quietude remain relevant? These two boats address such questions. Linked physically together, they also link the present to the past, the sacred to the secular, silence to voice. Within this visual and aural relationship, they demonstrate a practice in this place for this time."

http://www.thequietintheland.org/laos/project_hamilton.html
http://www.thequietintheland.org/laos/category.php?id=ann-hamilton
http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/ann-hamilton