Exhibition: River Bodies
at the Conflux festival
For thirty years, I watched the Strzyża creek disappear beneath my hometown Gdańsk. Highways and shopping malls replaced riparian forests. The stream was forced into an underground pipe. When this water infrastructure fails due to advancing climate change, local residents respond with collective ingenuity. They build sandbag dams to keep water away. Imaginative, bodily knowledge emerges where big scale protective systems break down. Choreographing Resilience introduces new improvised and inventive DIY acts of preparedness. The proposed resilience comes from many small actions, instead of one big plan.
In Rituelen van Henriëttewaard, punctual dike ruptures let the river Maas and its fertile sediments reclaim space, as communities develop DIY harvesting and bio-based building rituals to rehearse living with seasonal flooding.
Living with Impermanence extends this same logic to beavers, whose porous dams and underground tunnels disrupt the Dutch dikes. What looks like damage is reframed as ecological repair: they slow down water and recreate lost wetlands.
Together, these projects propose collective, multispecies resistance as response to the breakdown of water control systems. Temporary DIY actions and animal agency become tactics of collective emancipation and ways of rehearsing unavoidable rewetted futures.
In Rituelen van Henriëttewaard, punctual dike ruptures let the river Maas and its fertile sediments reclaim space, as communities develop DIY harvesting and bio-based building rituals to rehearse living with seasonal flooding.
Living with Impermanence extends this same logic to beavers, whose porous dams and underground tunnels disrupt the Dutch dikes. What looks like damage is reframed as ecological repair: they slow down water and recreate lost wetlands.
Together, these projects propose collective, multispecies resistance as response to the breakdown of water control systems. Temporary DIY actions and animal agency become tactics of collective emancipation and ways of rehearsing unavoidable rewetted futures.