DUNA Is the title of my one-person show at my Bridge Guard residency (from April through June). Everything in the installation is from the river Danube. I collected the driftwood and pottery shards from both the Slovak and Hungarian sides of the Danube. Some of the shards are hundreds of years old.

The people in this area have lived without the Maria Valeria bridge for more years than they have with it. Destroyed twice and then rebuilt in 2001 it connects people of similar heritage but now different countries. The people here were divided and assigned to 5 different nations during the last century. During the communist years families would call to one another across the river to share births and deaths, as visits required permits that were almost impossible to get approved.

Driftwood and shards do not say from which side of the river they came. The river serves as a border but behaves like a force. It draws water, wood, things and people to it. It mixes, rearranges and shapes what it finds as do people. This is how we create what we know, and what we are. And we can't take it with us, someone else will build something new from it later.