Haverford College students launched a hand-built rowboat onto the Schuylkill River from Flat Rock Park in Lower Merion on Oct. 3. The vessel, called the Riff Raft, came equipped with flute-topped oars carved from campus trees and a seat that doubles as a printing press.
The boat is the work of visiting assistant professor of environmental studies Dylan Gauthier's Ecologies of Cooperation class, according to Haverford College. Tri-College students and two visiting artist collectives spent weeks assembling the flat-bottomed rowboat outside the college's VCAM facility, gluing and clamping plywood pieces cut by the Maker Arts Space's CNC machine.
Artist and boatbuilder Jean Barberis oversaw construction. On a late-September morning, Barberis worked beneath the Class of 1999's magnolia tree while Johnny Cash's bass-baritone rumbled from a Bluetooth speaker nearby. Barberis, who has lived on a boat on Newtown Creek, a Superfund site between Brooklyn and Queens, guided students through the joinery.
The project brought together two artist collectives Gauthier has worked with for years. He co-founded the New York-based Mare Liberum (Latin for "free seas") in 2008 after he and friends adopted a retired naval rescue boat and brought it to Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. The San Francisco-based Futurefarmers, founded by artist Amy Franceschini, shaped the boat's more playful elements.
The Riff Raft's footboards carry an engraved map of the Schuylkill and its tributaries. A seat doubles as a printing press to create what Gauthier called "propaganda or ephemera along the way as we row."
The oars, crafted from black walnut harvested in Haverford's arboretum and planed by Pete Dorwart, a 1963 Haverford alumnus, are each topped with a hand-carved flute made from limbs students collected.
"Everybody knows an oar rows a boat, but if it also is a flute, it kind of destabilizes you for a second," Franceschini said. "And we feel like if art can make you ask questions, it's doing something."
The flutes carry a layer of campus history. Haverford's Quaker founders viewed music with suspicion because of its ties to theaters and dance halls. The college did not allow instruments on campus until the late 1800s. Franceschini and Gauthier also drew on songbooks from the college's Quaker & Special Collections to develop a score for the boat.
Gauthier said getting people onto waterways changes how they think about pollution and neglect. Many of the Schuylkill's tributaries have been buried, paved over, or rerouted into culverts and sewers, he said. Philadelphia exists because of its rivers, but their histories get "decoupled from the present sometimes, which then allows us to not care about those places."
The Riff Raft joins an earlier Gauthier project connecting Haverford to the Schuylkill: a punt he built with students in 2015 that still hangs at Philadelphia's Bartram's Garden. The Ecologies of Cooperation class continues through the fall semester.
