Fluid Topographies: Water, Power, Myth

Falaise IX from the series Falaise, 2016 © Misha de Ridder, courtesy of Galerie Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam

Text by Eugenie Shinkle

Dry land is a myth.

You’re a fool to believe in something you’ve never seen.

No, you said it yourself, that you’ve seen it.

In the 1995 post-apocalyptic action movie Waterworld — from which these lines of dialogue are taken — the polar icecaps have melted and flooded the earth. The few remaining humans live on makeshift floating islands, fighting off attacks from bands of marauding pirates. Their only hope for long-term survival comes in the form of a small enclave of habitable terrain known as ‘Dryland’. Unseen and uncharted, dry land is a myth: an oasis of solid ground in a shifting world of water.

Waterworld reverses the normal order of things: culturally and historically, it is water, rather than dry land, that has captivated the cultural imagination. The deepest parts of the ocean are as alien as outer space. Constantly in motion, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, water resists representation. We can speak of a topo graphy of the seabed, for instance, but not of the ocean itself: maritime boundaries are cartographical abstractions, imaginary lines drawn on subaquatic terrain, impossible to inscribe onto the shifting volumes of liquid above. The work in this issue reflects on the capricious nature of water, and on the multiple registers of power into which it is inscribed: the physical power of water as something measurable and immediate; water as a tool of economic and political power; and water as the expression of deeper and more primordial meanings — a matrix of collective memory and myth.

Farmland Guide, Qinghai, China from the series Traces II: The Source, 2014 © Ian Teh, courtesy of the artist and PanosPictures (right side of spread)

Water is an economic necessity, and, increasingly, a strategic commodity. With demand predicted to double by the middle of this century, water looks set to become more important than oil: hydropolitics, rather than geopolitic, are likely to shape the political landscape of the twenty-first-century. Supplies often cross national and international borders, leading to im balances of power and disputes over transboundary waters. Israel’s Six-Day War was fought, in part, over attempts by Jordan and Syria to seize control of the headwaters of the Jordan River — Israel’s primary source of fresh water. Belgian photographer Jan Rosseel’s A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel follows the changing topography along the course of the Jordan River as it runs from Israel’s fertile, Mediterranean north to the harsh deserts of the south. Rosseel’s photographs of the landscape reveal few traces of the dispute; instead, he has used archival imagery to identify the various agencies and political actors who played a part in the conflict. In Corinne Silva’s Garden State (2016), changes to the landscape are more evident. Many of the settlements built in Israel’s occupied territories after 1967 include lush gardens. Described by Silva as “[...] part of the mechanics of a colonial enterprise that attempts to permanently alter the territory,” the creation of gardens is a way of enacting soft power — a subtle method of claiming land and water reserves, with complex i rrigation systems supporting non-native species.

Company golf course reserved for visiting ship owners from the series Fish Story, 1989-95 © Allan Sekula, courtesy of MACK (republished by MACK, 2018)

The effects of climate change on human populations has led to the creation of a new kind of migrant — ‘climate refugees’ — forced to abandon rural economies and seek work in urban areas, or driven out of their homes by flooding. Gideon Mendel has been photographing flood zones around the world since 2007. Drowning World — three linked photographic series and a video project — looks at the human and material consequences of rising global water levels. Floodwaters have little respect for geopolitical boundaries, and the project, as Mendel writes, speaks of a “shared human experience that erases geographical and cultural divides”. Water may destroy property indiscriminately, but the human experience of flooding is not equally shared. Chris Jordan’s 2005 series In Katrina’s Wake documents the devastation caused to the city of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina in 2005. The lowest-income districts — most of them home to African-American residents — were among the hardest hit by the hurricane, and the slowest to recover. The dwellings that Mendel photographs in countries like Nigeria, Haiti, and Brazil are simple and sparsely furnished, many of them built in floodprone areas that wealthier citizens can afford to avoid.

Large-scale interference with water resources can upset fragile ecosystems both above and below the ground. In China, subterranean water supplies have been disrupted by deep well drilling for industry and agriculture, and by the overgrazing of livestock. Benoit Aquin is among a number of photographers — including the UK’s Sean Gallagher and British-Malaysian Ian Teh — reporting on the growing problem of water resource management in China and surrounding countries. Aquin’s The Chinese “Dust Bowl” examines the surface effects caused by the depletion of groundwater supplies. Teh’s 2014 project Traces II: the Source looks at the desertification of the Tibetan Plateau, where changes in traditional agricultural practices, such as nomadic grazing, have left behind a monochrome landscape of vast, shifting sand dunes. Despite massive remediation efforts — including a tree-planting project dubbed the Great Green Wall — the sand continues to consume terrain at a rate of more than 1000 square miles every year. The resulting landscape is both sublime and eerily anonymous: the dust and sand that move in as pastureland gives way to desert draw a veil over the terrain, making it difficult to identify specific landmarks or places.

Flooding draws people together in the short term, but the potential to rebuild lives is partitioned along the lines of nationality, race, and income. Receding floodwaters reveal huge disparities in political and economic agency: it is likely that the world’s poorest populations will feel the effects of rising water levels most strongly.

Such asymmetries of power are to be found throughout the history of humanity’s relationship to water. Inspired, in part, by stories of the mass exodus of North African refugees across the Mediterranean following recent political upheavals in the area, John Akomfrah’s three-screen video installation Vertigo Sea reflects on the way that diverse histories and geographies are bound together by the sea. Juxtaposing narratives of diaspora and migration with histories of oceangoing endeavour — nuclear testing, the movement of goods and people, the harvesting of marine resources — Vertigo Sea links these accounts to shared cultural motifs such as historical discourses of romanticism and the sublime. Maritime shipping is now a global industry, with approximately 90% of trade goods shipped by sea. But this achievement is built on a history of violent exploitation. In Akomfrah’s installation, panoramic views of the aquatic landscape are set against brutal images of whaling, of political prisoners executed by drowning, of slaves thrown overboard as excess cargo. Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989-95), explores maritime trade as a global network, concentrated in wealthy centres of capital accumulation and served by ‘exploitable peripheries’ — politically and economically vulnerable populations of workers. For both Sekula and Akomfrah, the sea is the matrix not just of globalisation, but of individual and national identity; the history of maritime space is built around ideological narratives that paper over the cracks in a divided world.

Receding floodwaters reveal huge disparities in political and economic agency: it is likely that the world’s poorest populations will feel the effects of rising water levels most strongly.

Ports and trade routes inland have historically been sources of power, and the Thames Estuary has played a key role in the growth of London as an international city. By the early twentieth-century, the Thames — described by Joseph Conrad as the ‘highway to the Empire’ — was the busiest river in the world, a conduit to Britain’s economic and military domination. The estuary landscape is also a fragile ecosystem of low-lying marshland, under threat from rising sea levels and urban expansion. For Nadav Kander, however, this landscape is the setting for a more introspective journey. In Dark Line — The Thames Estuary, the estuary serves, in Kander’s words, “[...] not as a geographical landscape but as a mystical space.” Here, the interface between land and water is a metaphor for the uncertain boundary between historical fact and cultural myths of

Tibetan Resettelement. Golog Tibeton Autonomous, Qinghai, China from the series Traces II: The Source, 2014 © Ian Teh, courtesy of the artist and PanosPictures (left half of spread)

power and domination. The relationship between the two is, in part, one of forgetting, and something of this absence is embodied in Kander’s photographs, which refuse the open, panoramic views that characterise historic depictions of maritime space. The relics of Britain’s industrial and colonial heritage that dot the shoreline are vague and shadowy; the vertical format of Kander’s images focuses attention on the dark, inscrutable surface of the water itself.

South Korean photographer Boomoon also seeks something more primoridal in his pictures, photographing in environments that are still relatively free from signs of human interference. Shot in Iceland, the images in his Waterfall series deliberately exclude any references to the surrounding area, focusing instead on the physical power of the water itself. Here, the expansive, three-dimensional space of the traditional seascape is collapsed into abstract, two dimensional compositions. With little indication of relative size or distance, our own position as a viewer becomes ambiguous — a disorienting perspective that conveys something of the sense of awe and insignificance that we still feel in the presence of forces beyond our control. Dutch photographer Misha de Ridder is also drawn to places that resist the easy inscription of cultural meaning. His series Falaise (2016) explores the actions of light and weather and tidal movements on the chalk cliffs at Normandy. Once a popular holiday destination, the cliffs are slowly crumbling as rising sea levels erode their base. For De Ridder and Boomoon, the power of water is both literal and allegorical. At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between our impact on nature and nature’s impact on us, water is an apt symbol for hidden forces that we may set in motion, but which we may not have the power to contain. However cynical we may have become about its meaning, or even its existence, ‘nature’ is still a powerful generative force.

Tibetan Resettelement. Golog Tibeton Autonomous, Qinghai, China from the series Traces II: The Source, 2014 © Ian Teh, courtesy of the artist and PanosPictures (right half of spread)

The idea of nature as an abstract quality — or, to borrow Boomoon’s phrase, as a place “uncontaminated by words and meaning” — runs counter to conventions of topographic landscape photography. The idea of the topographic has long been linked to the representation of space as a set of visible, measurable quantities. Since the 1970s, it has been associated with the so-called ‘new topographics’ aesthetic — a distanced, analytical style of photography that seeks to convey substantial amounts of visual information without expressing emotion or opinion. Writing in 2001, sociologist Saskia Sassen observed that topographic depictions of the city fail to capture the way that global networks of power take on physical form in the urban environment. Though built space itself can be shown in a photograph, she wrote, the forces driving the growth of cities remain largely invisible. Water presents similar challenges to visibility. Even documentary images of its effects on the landscape often fail to supply the sort of information that we expect topographic images to provide. Can photographs of flooded or drought-ravaged landscapes really capture the magnitude of climate change? Can they identify the diverse political and environmental agents (human and non-human) that are implicated in the movement of water? The stillness — a kind of silence bordering on muteness — that characterises much of the work in this issue suggests that they cannot. Instead, what unites these projects is an attraction to those qualities of water that are most difficult to transcribe in an image.

Water is an elemental force, the basis of enduring cultural myths. It is a basic requirement of all life forms, and a symbolic cornerstone of nearly all religions — an emblem of purification and transformation. It is part of us — our bodies are made up of 80% water — but also an alien environment, utterly other. As Akomfrah remarks, aquatic space poses “[...] questions of mortality, of becoming, of relativity, the demarcations of human and nonhuman.” What the images in this issue suggest collectively is more than just the power of water (or its absence) to transform environments and lives in the present. They also hint at water’s intangible affects, equally real, but standing, to some extent, to one side of historical events. They explore water as an invisible force that underpins culture, politics, and history — an element that shares power’s diffuse, transformative nature, and the ability of myth to transcend historical circumstance. We might therefore regard these diverse projects not as documentary investigations, but as something more akin to philosophical speculations: reflections on the fluid topographies of water, power, and myth.