Driftless at Pulverturm

At Pulverturm, Am Schlosswall, 26122 Oldenburg

Admission free

Opening times: Friday 14:00-18:00, Saturday and Sunday 11:00-18:00

Driftless embraces various seascapes as open and public sites for artistic interventions. In this video installation, a performer travels across large bodies of water while drifting away in a precarious raft that references makeshift strategies for border crossing. This cinematic and performative journey across the planet creates a visual narrative that borrows from migration stories and explores the ocean as post-national negative territory through acts of radical seafaring.

In 2012 I attempted to build the smallest boat that could hold only one person’s weight. As a result, I devised a precarious way to navigate through large bodies of water using generic construction materials and a chair, while confronting unruly seascapes from within. This gesture became an eight-year durational performance and then a film, which started in lake Wesserunsett in Main (Northeast of the USA) and then was re-enacted in places like the Pacific Coast of Colombia, Mexico, California, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Philippines and Australia among many. The film ‘wanders-through’ large bodies of water at the margins of modern life and where notions of nationhood appear as mere modes of contemporary confinement. Through a derive, which blurs borderlines and even the natural features of radically different locations around the world, this journey traverses not only space but also nature-culture relations by exposing the paradoxes of a territorial system that desperately seeks to restrict human movement while constantly increasing its reliance on transportation networks and migrant labor.

This installation is part of the exhibition Felipe Castelblanco: Counter-Expeditions, which will be on display at the Haus of Media Art from July 2 to September 28, 2025.