River Practices

River Practices will be an evening event showcasing different forms of artistic, activist and spatial practices engaged with rivers, waterbodies and environmental justice. Registration Required.

We will see and hear presentations from Polish artist-activists ZAKOLE Collective, and the collaborative sound installation A Chorus of Singing Rivers, a performance lecture entitled Traces in Continuum by artist-researcher and architect Ameneh Solati, and more…

ZAKOLE is a collective rooted in a wetland located within the city of Warsaw – Zakole Wawerskie. Our goal is to attune to its ecosystem, its inhabitants and visitors, and to identify and map its various meanings. We work at the intersection of art, education, and activism, searching for diverse ways of experiencing and telling stories of feral swamps. The project creates possibilities of generating and exchanging various kinds of knowledges: historical and scientific as well as personal, embodied and based on sensory experiences.

The Chorus of Singing Rivers collective is a collaborative sound installation that emerged from doctoral research processes conducted by Carolina Cuevas Parra, Laura Giraldo-Martínez, and Catalina Rey-Hernández within the Riverhood and River Commons projects at Wageningen University. The collective explores sound-based methodologies in political ecology research. Through this choral listening and methodology, we explore the stories, knowledges, conflicts, memories, and affections that arise when we activate the auditory dimension in political ecology and activist research. The multiple “voices” of rivers intertwine, singing together and reaching commonalities, cacophonies, polyphonies, and resonances that collectively open us to new questions, common paths, and shared solidarities.

In the performance lecture Traces in Continuum, Ameneh Solati will present a selection of short films from her film installation Traces of Ten Villages (1985–2025) focusing on the wetlands in Southern Iraq. They will be accompanied by readings and reflections that interrogate the abstractions, discrepancies, ruptures, and erasures embedded in the spatial and archival traces.

River Practices is a part of the two-day closed international workshop Conflict Rivers organised by Ifor Duncan and hosted by the EcoViolence Research project, and part funded of the Network for Environmental Humanities, and Critical Pathways.