Rivers are water bodies of immense importance for biodiversity and against climate change. They have been central to our human understanding of landscape and embedded in stories of livelihood, myth, and art for centuries. Yet, in our current world they are often framed as a mere resource to be exploited and engineered. We, an international team of artists, curators and scientists (from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Switzerland and Europe) initiated “River Landscapes” as a collaborative research project. It recognises that the extractive framing of rivers is shaped by the language that we use to describe them. It mirrored and mirrors still today colonial and capitalist agendas. Joining forces with artists and researchers, we want to create a new glossary in order to help shape a relationship to our precious water bodies which acknowledges them as landscapes of many species and cultures.
The control of rivers started as early as the mid nineteenth century, when European rivers such as the Rhine were straightened, and their undulations eliminated to make them into flood free transport channels through the use of technology, dams, barrages and gates. As rivers became more predictable, previous riverbeds were used for industrialisation in the name of development. Land became appropriated between urban land bodies and flood and irrigation departments, while the interstices in the form of intertidal zones and wetlands were considered useless, to be drained and ‘recovered.’ What was lost was the complex biodiversity of plants, aquatic life, and human-river cultural interactions. This universalisation of rivers as hydraulic water flows became the language of dam engineers and water commissions in the colonies, justifying massive infrastructural interventions on rivers. Technology to aid this became universal and transported from one river system to another, from the Rhine to the Mississippi to the Ganges, to the Indus. The term ‘Colonial Hydrology’ has been commonly used by scholars. Hence, to recover the idea of rivers as entangled landscapes of nature/culture, we are creating a decolonised glossary which grasps rivers as expansive water landscapes. The glossary collects stories, imagery and sound by artists, researchers and locals and thereby aims to articulate diverse forms of knowledge and experience.
In collaboration with a.o.
WE ARE AIA I Awareness in Art Zurich, CH
Toxic Links, not-for-profit organization New-Delhi, India
The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Pakristan
Science Gallery Bengaluru in Bangalore, India
ILEA – Insitute for Land and Environmental Art in Safiental, CH
Prameya Art Foundation New-Delhi, India
Supported by the Pro Helvetia Synergies fund.
Graphic Design by operative.space.
