Floating Museum, a collaboration with Faheem Majeed, aims to take a culturally significant institution and re-site it by floating an architectural reenactment north, up the Chicago River to downtown. The project will transform the DuSable Museum into a craft plying the waters of the Chicago River, acting as a stage where artists will engage with the fluidity of history, race, class and access to power. By shifting the geography of the museum from the Southside to Downtown and reimagining what it houses, the project is dedicated to critically rehashing what the purpose of such an institution is, how its history is written, and what its future may hold.

A key aspect of the project explores the discursive area around the term site-specific: an area combed over by Miwon Kwon, who writes in One Place After Another that site specificity is not an exclusively artistic genre but a problem idea, or a peculiar cipher of art and spatial politics. The project will use architectural reenactment embedded in the city to create a cipher to unlock Kwon’s eventual thesis: that site specificity is the cultural mediation of broader social, economic, and political processes that organize urban life and space.

The site-specific structure will be built out of new and repurposed materials scavenged from the neighborhood around the museum. The house-sized structure will float on a barge and get tethered across from the site of the stalled commemorative Jean Baptiste du Sable Park project in downtown Chicago and house a curated exhibit where artists will be asked to reimagine the museum's collection.

The project seeks to make transparent the constructed boundaries between inside and outside, and public and private by staging an exhibition and the performative act of pushing a museum into a state of buoyancy. Which is to say, using performative architecture and exhibition to capture the moment when loaded historical currency and its associated weight is refocused and seen in a new way.