Feature /Jimmy Grima / The School of Wind and Waves

Expeditie programme at the festival Oerol.

Later in July, we will visit Amsterdam hosted by the festival Over het Ij. There the School is looking for workers managing man-made rivers and city canals. Amsterdam has a very long history of man-made canalisation.

In Amsterdam, the School will ask the invited speakers to bring a tool and a water sample from their workplace, and a small audience will be invited to visit the site and attend the live events. After tuning into the specified FM frequency, the audience can listen to the live interviews while exploring the area overlooking the man-made river Ij which connects Amsterdam to the North Sea through the Noordzeekanaal.

JD: What is the future of The School? Where do you intend to take it?

JG: Over the following months, The School has two main trajectories. Firstly it will continue the exploration through the aforementioned guides.

Guides Covers society, the workforce behind water management, is another source of embodied and epistemic expertise we would like to collect and preserve.

JD: What themes is The School researching, documenting and working on now? Where can we see the work?

JG : The School is publishing a series of short guides on trapping practices with V/A, an online magazine initiated by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. For now, the series consists of the traps of lizards, songbirds part 1 and part 2 and wild rabbits. The starting point for this series was some of the old-time practices I experienced as a child and almost forgot along the way. Through these series, I capture the essentials and some tips for tricks. The idea is to be introduced to a different way of relating with nature in terms of proximity, to go out there and engage instead of simply reading about it.

At the School, we started a project collecting recordings of conversations with water workers to create a repository of their views and sensitivities towards this wet element. The idea is to travel and pick up specific water management topics related to the geographic areas we visit. For example, in June, the School will travel to Terschelling, an island in the North Sea of the Netherlands, to unpack “Drinking Water”. The island stands on top of a freshwater bubble in the North Sea, providing half of the island. The rest is connected through a pipeline from the mainland. We will present our discoveries as part of the

Secondly, it will focus on nonmainstream knowledge about water and aqueous ecologies in the Netherlands, starting with listening to workers whose livelihoods are fundamentally shaped by this element.

The School of Winds and Waves aspires to grow into a multilingual project and to create a community of contributors visiting and working in different geographic areas.

In exploring Water, we are particularly interested in visiting and working on Islands, which are isolated and marginalized geographically. And port, river and lake cities because of their complex relationship between urban development and the natural habitat.

The School can organise classes/ expeditions/outings around these topics for adults and younger audiences to learn things that do not belong to the curriculum. It will be an invitation to look beyond the digital two-dimensional world confined to acclimatized spaces inside, get out there, and directly engage with the natural environment.

Finally, here is a list of relevant bibliographic conclusions to this interview in case the readers want to engage with the subject further.

Explosive Histories, my essay on firework masters in Malta published on various artists by Pro Helvetia, ilBahar Rasu Iebsa by Lino Psaila, Birds of Passage: Hunting and Conservation in Malta by Mark Anthony Falzon, How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield, Hot Money by Naomi Klein , All Art is Ecological by Timothy Morton, and We Belong to Gaia by James Lovelock.