River Ecologies

RIVER ECOLOGIES Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Challenging anthropocentric conventions that seek to harness the river for econo­ mic, cultural and political purposes, River Ecologies places the complex ecological materiality of the Danube at the centre of artistic and scholarly attention. Drawing on the insights of artists, scientists, anthropologists, writers and environmental historians, brought together in the experiential setting of the River School, this collective inquiry journeys to sites of urban and natural wilderness to explore issues of reciprocity, resilience, non-human agency and interspecies solidarity. From the confluence of contemporary art and environmental humanities, the artistic and theoretical reflections of River Ecologies flow through the critical habitats of Rewilding Mentalities, Avian Ethnographies, Environmental Histories and Biosphere Responsibility to reengage with the natural world.

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube is edited by art and ecology researchers Drs. Maja and Reuben Fowkes, directors of Translocal Institute of Contemporary Art Budapest.

Greta Alfaro Lise Autogena Vlad Basalici Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan Ursula Biemann Axel Braun Peter Coates Ian Fairlie Fernando Garcia-Dory Michal Hvorecky John Jordan and Isa Fremeaux József R. Juhász Tamás Kaszás and Anikó Loránt Szabolcs Kisspál London Fieldworks Cecylia Malik Ilona Németh James Prosek Andrea Roe Martin Schmid Miruna Tîrcă Vaylo Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Fowkes RIVER ECOLOGIES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES ON THE DANUBE

www.translocal.org

RIVER

ECOLOGIES Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube

Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

RIVER ECOLOGIES Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes

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Contents

Preface 8 Introduction 12 Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Rewilding Mentalities

Fluvio-centric (and more cheerful) Currents of River History Peter Coates Conversation with Frogs Vlad Basalici, Ursula Biemann, Maja and Reuben Fowkes Immersed in Amphibian Worlds Ursula Biemann The Stream Ecology of Life Vlad Basalici Urban Survival Strategies in the Bucharest Delta Miruna Tîrcă The River and the City Valyo

Avian Ethnographies

Urban Wildlife Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan Unconscious Environmentalism Ex-Artists Collective (Tamás Kaszás / Anikó Loránt) A Love of Birds James Prosek Between Premonition and Knowledge London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson) Vulture Culture Greta Alfaro State of Perpetual Aliveness Andrea Roe The Rise of a Fallen Feather Szabolcs KissPál

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28 37 41 44 47 50

56 60 64 68 71 74 77

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Environmental Histories

Quicker, Higher, Further? The Transformation of the Danube from the Point of View of an Environmental Historian Martin Schmid And I as a Ship Ilona Németh Human Flood Level Indicator József R. Juhász Some Kind of Opposition Axel Braun Nuclear Dangers Ian Fairlie Danube in America Michal Hvorecky

Biosphere Responsibility

86 89 92 95 102 104

An Open Letter in the Dark John Jordan and Isa Fremeaux A Tribal Way of Thinking Tamás Kaszás Co-evolve, Resist and Flourish Fernando Garcia-Dory How to Make Friends with a River Cecylia Malik Anchoring Knowledge Lise Autogena

112

Biographies Acknowledgements Index Colophon

138 146 148 156

Contents

116 120 124 129

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Preface

This book is the outcome of the River School project that between 2013 and 2015 took place mostly along the Danube in both cities and wilderness areas, and was made up of a series of study days, workshops, symposia, exhibitions and excursions. The first call on this winding river journey was the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which at the end of August 2013 was the setting for a symposium on Navigating Ecological Times. Together with project curators and editors of this volume, Drs. Maja and Reuben Fowkes, artists Tamás Kaszás, Lise Autogena and Fernando Garcia-Dory took part in a conversation which opened up many of the questions around living with rivers, engag­ ing with the natural world and making art in the anthropocene that would become the focus of River Ecologies.

In October 2013 the River School rejoined the river in Budapest for the Danube Currents seminar at Central European University, which focused on the social and cultural as­ pects of the river Danube and included presentations by Slovak writer Michal Hvorecky and Budapest-based activist Cili Lohász. This event provided a foretaste of the larger symposium held at the university the following year, both of which were organised in cooperation with Dr. Alan Watt of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy and the Centre for Arts and Culture at CEU, building on a long-standing collabo­ ration with Translocal Institute around issues of sustainability and contemporary art.

The River School exhibition opened at Trafó Gallery Budapest in December 2013 and was called Like a Bird: Avian Ecologies in Contemporary Art. It presented the work of Greta Alfaro, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Tamás Kaszás and Anikó Loránt, Sz­ abolcs Kisspál, London Fieldworks, James Prosek and Andrea Roe, all of whom have contributed interviews to this volume that illuminate their practice and work in the show. While focusing on avian ecologies, Like a Bird provided a platform to investi­ gate contiguous issues around the changing human relationship to the natural world, the channelling of environmental awareness, and its social and political dimensions, themes that also run through the reflections gathered in this book.

The exhibition itself migrated in May 2014 to tranzit.ro in Bucharest, a slight deviation from the course of the Danube that brought in many new perspectives and responses to the artistic and theoretical investigations of the River School. As at many points in

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

the project, indoor symposia and exhibitions were complemented with outdoor excur­ sions, and in Bucharest participants were taken on a tour of the accidental wilderness of the Bucharest Delta led by anthropologist Miruna Tircâ. An excursion to the Danube Delta was one of the core experiential moments of the River School and a unique op­ portunity to be immersed in the wilderness of a river bio reserve in the company of artists Ursula Biemann and Vlad Basalici.

The artistic and theoretical tributaries of the River School flowed together at the sym­ posium on Art, Ecopower and the Liberation of Energy held at CEU Budapest in Octo­ ber 2014, with the participation of artists Axel Braun, József R. Juhász, Cecylia Malik, Ilona Németh and James Prosek, environmental historians Peter Coates and Martin Schmid, scientist Ian Fairlie and writer Nick Thorpe. Vivid discussions about the en­ vironmental history of rivers, human and river agency, as well as the social, political and artistic histories of the Danube continued over a riverboat excursion upstream to Szentendre, with an alternative tour led by curator Márton Pacsika of its rich artistic and social history.

The final outcome of the non-institutionalised, fluviocentric and multisensory learn­ ing experience of the River School is the publication River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube. The reference to environmental humanities in the title reflects the wide-ranging contributions of environmental his­ torians, environmental theorists, anthropologists and scientists as well as writers and artists to the project, who whatever their particular field approached the river in the spirit demanded by anthropocene awareness, namely that we mentally insert the en­ vironmental prefix before our research activities. ‘On the Danube’ places this inquiry in a particular setting that transcends national, social and ethnic boundaries, turning our attention towards the materiality of the river and alluding to the many species with which we share its flows.

Preface

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Introduction 11

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

River ecologies:

contemporary art and environmental humanities on the Danube In the overture to the experimental film Ister (2004), set on a boat journey from the Black Sea to the Black Forest, where the grand scenery of the Danube provides an extended meditation on Heidegger’s reference to Hölderin’s ode to the river, philoso­ pher Bernard Stiegler cuts to the core of the Promethean mentality of domination over nature.1 Prometheus, ‘the master of fire, technics and knowledge’ is countered with his lesser known brother Epimetheus, the forgetful god who was given the task of as­ signing qualities to mortals - both animals and humans, the distribution of which repre­ sents according to Stiegler ‘the ecological balance of nature.’ These alternate streams of ecological prudence and an ethos of technological domination also surface in the work of Austrian social thinker Ivan Illich, whose Deschooling Society (1971), voicing a prescient institutional critique, concludes with a call for the ‘rebirth of Epimethean man.’2 It was in part to unlearn dominance-charged attitudes to the natural world and sidestep the institutional structures that sustain this mentality that the River School was conceived, and it is the results of this integrated and unmediated approach to understanding the river and its ecologies that are brought together here.

As the longest river in the heart of Europe, the Danube has been a recurrent topic for writers, poets and filmmakers and whether they linger in the national realm or fol­ low the river’s transnational flow, anthropocentric undercurrents can still be traced in their narratives. The film Ister, for instance, considers the human tragedies brought by recent conflicts that touched its banks, as well as the dark memories that swirl around the river’s wartime sites and the barbarity of the fascist ideology that origi­ nated upstream. Human concerns were also central to the Vienna-based TBA21 art project Küba: Journey against the Current, which was staged around a video work by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman and installed on a barge that made its way from the Black Sea to Vienna. It stopped in each country for local artistic responses that focussed mainly on migration, history and memory, identity and self-representation. This ini­ 1 Ister (2004), directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross. tiative, in response to the floods of 2006 2 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion that dramatically affected downstream Boyars, 2010 [first published 1970]), 116. populations, was also framed as an op­ 3 Francesca von Habsburg, in: Cran, Gabrielle and portunity to ‘remind ourselves of our com­ Daniela Zyman, Küba: A Journey against the Curmon humanity’.3 rent (Vienna: Springer, 2010), 11.

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

In addition to explorations that are immersed in local identities, histories and politics, with occasional forays into the universal, a further layer of interpretation that restricts access to the river is also at play. It can be found on the contents pages of Danube travelogues, where chapters for the sections downstream from Vienna are sugges­ tively entitled ‘East of Vienna, the Orient Begins’, ‘the Edge of Civilisation’ or ‘Into the Balkans’ for the moment the river enters Slovakia. The underlying rationale of this one-sided view of the river is summed up by the author of a recent cultural history who asserts that ‘the Danube’s familiar cultural legacy has been a Germanic one, con­ fined to the upper and middle courses of the river.’4 ‘At the Gates of Asia’ is also how Claudio Magris begins the Hungarian part of his epic literary journey down the Danube, exchanging the exoticism of the then still-standing Iron Curtain for the mysteriousness of the Orient. A phantasmagorical vision infused with national myths emerges from his description of the ‘mud of Pannonia’, flatlands that are ‘pasty with soil, with sodden leaves, and the blood-filled footprints, which have been left in the course of centuries by migrations and the clash of conflicting civilisations.’5 The exoticism attached to the river after it leaves the ostensibly civilised lands of the Upper Danube is though no obstacle to an expansive notion of the Donauraum as the natural sphere of German-speaking cultural-political influence. It comes as no surprise that for the field of Danube Studies, concentrating on international relations and eco­ nomics with no actual river in sight, the ‘language of the Danube is German’, despite the fact that for eight of the ten countries it flows through this is not the case.6 In this respect, Budapest-based author Nick Thorpe, who gave a vivid contribution to the River School symposium, made his journey upstream ‘like the sturgeon’ from the Black Sea to the Black Forest, in order to ‘represent the lives and the views of the people who live from and beside the river.’ Without falling into the trap of ‘romanticising the East,’ his Danube (2013) nevertheless counters the downstream perspective by testifying that ‘Europe was populated and civilised from the East.’7 In fact, as is made visible in the contributions to River Ecologies, there is a close correlation between undoing the cultural bias weighted towards the upper sections of the Danube and the creation of more river-centred narratives.

Sensitivity for the natural world and indif­ ference to cultural prejudices towards the lower Danube come to the fore in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a journey he made on foot from Holland to Constanti­ nople in 1934, spending much time along the banks of the river. Reading it today, under the burden of climate change, in­ creased disappearance of species and the great acceleration of contemporary life,8 this chronicle offers a vivid testimony

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

4 5 6 7 8

Andrew Beattie, The Danube: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xi.

Claudio Magris, Danube (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 253.

See for instance, Donauraum Studien at Andrássy University in Budapest: http://www.andrassyuni.eu/ Nick Thorpe, The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), xv.

See, Will Steffen et al., ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,’ Anthropocene Review (January 2015).

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to the possibility of experiencing the abundance of the natural world and achieving an integrated view of the relationship of humans and nature. ‘I was alone again with nothing but the swallows curvetting through the shadows or the occasional blue-green flash of a kingfisher to ruffle the stillness of leaves and water,’9 is just one of numer­ ous episodes in which we are made aware of the experiential openness to the natural environment of the young wayfarer. He makes space in his diary for the great bustard, herons, blackbirds, goldfinches, the thrush, cuckoo, moorhens, dragonflies, willows and frogs, while his description of storks flying over the Danube, where they ‘would take to the air and cross the river into Slovakia, sunlight caught the upper side of their wings; then they tilted and wheeled back into Hungary with hardly a feather moving,’10 indicates the primacy of ecological realities over transient political boundaries.

With this in mind, creating situations for unmediated, experiential encounters with the river and bringing awareness of the independent agency of its complex ecologies was central to the River School project and constitutes an important part of this volume.

Consequently, this inquiry runs counter to the social and political logic that turns the river into a marker of geopolitical struggles, a route for conquest and a delimiter of na­ tional territory, as well as a site for the expression of cultural supremacy, while exposing the economic agenda and its utilitarian rationale for harnessing the river’s resources and energy. Instead, uncovering the river’s environmental histories that reveal the long term impact of human interventions, which were regularly carried out on the grounds of navigability, flood control and hydropower and accelerated rapidly since industriali­ sation, points to both the anthropogenic changes to its geological presence as well as to the river’s resilience and agency. Furthermore, revisiting the moments that shape environmental art history as it gradually takes form in response to the challenge of the anthropocene directs us to the constitutive artistic contribution to rethinking the river.

In that sense, artistic actions condensed around specific geopolitical and environmen­ tal events prompted artists to speak and act on behalf of the river through protest ac­ tions that went beyond social and anthropocentric issues to extend to gestures of inter­ species solidarity. This project examines in particular artistic practices that are turned towards the concerns of multispecies ethnography, focussing on the coexistence of human and animal cultures within a common biosphere, exploring symbiotic relations and shared alliances across the species divide in the light of the current ecological cri­ sis. Finally, this book considers the implications of emerging ecological awareness for personal and social behaviours, and in particular the exploration through contempo­ rary art of non-capitalist lifestyles and experimental models that respond to impending environmental catastrophe by enacting new forms of biosphere responsibility.

The practical environmentalist program of ‘rewilding’, which seeks to return large swathes of human-altered landscape to nature, also has potential implications for

14

9

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople, the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (London: John Murray, 2004 [first published, 1986]), 66.

10 Ibid., 19.

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

attitudes to the natural world and creative practices. Rather than seeking to man­ age or preserve the existing landscape as traditional conservationists have attempted since the dawn of the industrial era, rewilders instead set in motion unpredictable en­ vironmental processes that are allowed to develop without human mediation. Putting the plan into practice was however conditioned on defining wilderness within a legal framework, which in the European context was consensually described as ‘an area governed by natural processes.’ Such areas would be composed of native habitats and species, large enough for the effective functioning of natural processes, while ‘un­ modified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.’11 Precisely by keeping the effects of humans as geological agents who extract, build and devastate away from these zones, the rewilders seem to be attempting to insulate wilderness from the consequences of the anthropocene.

Engaged in ‘initiating, stimulating and allowing natural processes to occur (again)’, the rewilding project aspires to a future in which habitats are able to sustain themselves without human intervention, while accepting that once unleashed, these processes ‘may not result in a predictable end-state.’12 The concept of nature here is therefore not static, foreseeable and scientifically-knowable, but an autonomous ecosystem characterised by spontaneity and risk. To rewild entails being prepared to relinquish the modern West­ ern compulsion to control and dominate the natural world, as well as to abandon the scientific desire to secure total knowledge of its processes. Understood as a theoretical concept, it potentially carries implications that go beyond its origins as a practical en­ vironmental program, as it also informs the current re-evaluation of the human relation to the natural world. It opens up questions about the possibility of rewilding not only the natural environment, but also the social and mental spheres, domains that were ad­ dressed in Gregory Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’ and Felix Guattari’s ‘mental ecology’.13 So what would the rewilding of mentalities entail? We are more accustomed right now to think about the opposite side of the spectrum, by delving into the ‘extractivist mind­ set’ so eloquently described by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate. Extractivism, which she identified as a ‘non-reciprocal, domi­ 11 ‘A Working Definition of European Wilderness and Wild Areas,’ Wild Europe 2012, p. 2. PDF avail­ nance based relationship with the earth, able at: http://wilderness-society.org/wp-content/ one purely of taking’ is associated with uploads/2014/02/116693719-Definition-of-Wilder­ ness-in-Europe-Draft.pdf ‘the mentality of the mountain top remov­ 12

Ibid., 7. er’, and involves ‘the reduction of life into 13 See, Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of objects for the use of others, giving them Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; no integrity or value of their own – turning first published, 1972) and Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2002; first living complex ecosystems into ‘natural published in French in 1989).

14 resources.’ While the extractivist men­ 14 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism tality is insensitive to the interrelations versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schus­ ter, 2014), 169. between ‘various objectified components

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

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of life’ and ignores ‘the consequences of severing them,’15 the contrasting mentality open to the processes of rewilding is alive to the interconnectedness of the natural world and attuned to the planetary consequences of our actions.

The technocratic mentality of extractivism, with ultimate responsibility for the disas­ trous consequences of the anthropocene, could be located in the dominant Western attitude towards nature. As anthropologists have pointed out, the limitations of this recent, atypical but currently widespread worldview stand in contrast to the more in­ tegrated outlook of indigenous peoples across the world. Philippe Descola has in this vein disputed the validity of entrenched assumptions of an a priori divide between hu­ mans and nature and challenged the universality of Western conventions of represent­ ing nature: ‘In many regions of the planet, humans and nonhumans are not conceived as developing in incommunicable worlds or according to quite separate principles.

The environment is not regarded objectively as an autonomous sphere. Plants and animals, rivers and rocks, meteors and the seasons do not exist all together in an on­ tological niche defined by the absence of human beings.’16 Such an atmosphere, which combines wilderness with an integrated human presence on a shared continuum, could be experienced in the Danube Delta, one of the most propi­ tious sites for rewilding. Notably five of the seven areas in Europe singled out as suitable for the rewilding project are located in Eastern Europe, pointing to a new geographical realignment which follows the realisation that in the light of ecological crisis the most precious areas of Europe may not be the citadels of urban culture, but actually the few remaining corners of wilderness to be found in the south and east of the continent. While most of the surviving wilderness zones are in mountainous terrain, the biosphere reserve of the Danube Delta, with its remote waterways on the edge of the Black Sea constituting Europe’s largest wetlands, is the only such site on a river. Home to numerous water birds, including pelicans, it is a favourite staging area for passage migrants, intersected with mosaic forests grazed by wild horses and cattle, and also harbours the largest number of fish species in Europe, while its human communities have since ancient times lived with the river in awareness of their dependence on this unique natural habitat.17 The Danube Delta is perhaps one of the most conducive spots to experiment with the processes leading towards the rewilding of mentalities, and as such was an important location for the River School. Creating fa­ 15 Ibid. vourable conditions for this to occur entails 16 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture undoing the influence of the restrictive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 30. assumptions about nature embedded in 17 See also the website of Rewilding Europe: Western science and culture by engaging http://www.rewildingeurope.com/ in what Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo 18 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Assemblages: Félix Guat­ Viveiros de Castro has called ‘the perma­ tari and Machinic Animism,’ E Flux Journal no. 36 nent decolonisation of thought.’18 Thus, (2012 / 7), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/assem­ setting aside theoretical preconceptions, blages-felix-guattari-and-machinic-animism/

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

treating with caution both indigenous informants as knowledge providers as well as the exclusivity of experts’ input were premises of the River School excursion to the Delta, which relied instead on immersion in, openness to and intercommunication with the actuality of the biosphere. Nevertheless, even for a light-footed artistic and cura­ torial fieldtrip the wilderness guidelines for conducting research are still of relevance.

These proscribe that research activity in wilderness zones should be ‘without ecologi­ cal impact’, and include the additional requirement of ‘minimal visual impact,’ which from an artistic perspective has particularly interesting ramifications.19 The curatorial and artistic excursion to the Danube Delta was one of several outings organised as part of the River School project, which also brought participants to the accidental wilderness of the ‘Bucharest Delta’ in a forgotten corner of the Romanian capital to become acquainted with a thriving urban biotope and the precarious human community that live there. A riverboat excursion upstream from Budapest to the small town of Szentendre provided an opportunity to experience the different pace of river travel and engage with the interwoven environmental and social histories of a riparian bioregion which is rich in artistic associations and has long served as a refuge from persecution. All the excursions were conceived as a chance to physically encounter nature or the river outside of the mental confines of the gallery or university, following the principles of ‘sensuous scholarship’, which is conceived as an attempt to animate the scholar’s body by fusing ‘the intelligible and the sensible’ in order ‘to awaken the imagination and bring scholarship back to the things themselves.’20 In that sense, these collective journeys provided an optimal setting for non-extractivist, non-hier­ archical and non-institutionalised experiences and conversations about the changing human relationship to the natural world.

These conversations were in fact not only held between human interlocutors but also directly included the voices of frogs in the Delta, followed the life journey of eels across the planet through illuminating artist-led lessons,21 and investigated avian ecologies in a migrating exhibition setting. Indeed, over the course of the River School, multispe­ cies ethnographies formed part of the core curriculum, through studying the entan­ glement of humans with other animals whose lives are equally shaped by soci­ 19 See, ‘‘A Working Definition of European Wilder­ al, political and economic forces.22 This ness and Wild Areas,’ 8. more zoe-egalitarian approach draws on 20 Paul Stoller, Sensual Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xii and xv. the posthumanist critique of human ex­ 21

See, James Prosek, Eels: An Exploration from New ceptionalism, which posits a fundamen­ Zealand to the Sargasso of the World’s Most Mystal separation of humans from the natu­ terious Fish (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). ral world, and is oriented towards what 22 See, S, Kirksey and S. Helmreich, ‘The emergence of multispecies ethnography,’ Cultural Anthropolanthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his book ogy 4 vol. 25: 545–576.

How Forest’s Think formulates as ethno­ 23 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an graphic research into ‘that which lies be­ Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 2013), 7. yond the human.’23

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Even when directing attention beyond the human, the anthropocentric tendency to relegate animals to the role of metaphors that talk about human concerns often comes to the fore. For instance, István Harasztÿ’s Like a Bird from 1972, an iconic work of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, expressed a shared experience of imprisonment. The work consisted of a specially constructed mechanical cage with doors that automatically shut if the bird inside tried to escape, creating a vivid metaphor for the lack of freedom under socialism. Animal encounters in the public sphere are layered with stratum of ideology, mythology and national identity, with birds figuring historically as metaphors for human visions of the other world, the soul, freedom, peace, as well as symbols of national identity. The exhibition bearing the title Like a Bird posed the question of whether the avian metaphor actually migrated itself as a consequence of anthropocene consciousness and is now colonising new meanings in contemporary critical practice.

Considering whether there is now an additional dimension to the avian imaginary which arises from a shared ecological predicament and sense of endangeredness, the exhibi­ tion also investigated the territories for encounters with actual birds today.

It is the tension between living species and their metaphorical role in the creation of nationalist imagery that was examined at length by Szabolcs Kisspál in works realised for the River School exhibition. The artist marked the flight paths of Saker Falcons on maps of the European continent based on data collected from electronic tags placed on individual members of an endangered species that is assumed to be related to the mythical Turul bird of Hungarian national mythology. In the original myth, the Turul led the Magyar tribes into the Carpathian basin to show them the land of their future country, while a thousand years later, thanks to a European Union ecological programme, it is now possible to trace their real flying habits and to map out with irony ‘the possible territory of Greater Hungary.’ In that sense, the political commentary that runs through Greater Hungaries examines the discrepancy between the real and symbolic, uncovering the ideological distortions at play in the nationalist attribution of metaphorical functions to animals.

The place that birds inhabit within the Western-centric imagination is addressed in Greta Alfaro’s film In Ictu Oculi, with vultures taking centre stage. The artist, who intervened in their natural habitat of the Spanish mountains of Navarra by laying a lavish feast in the middle of the wilderness, created a tempting situation for the hungry vultures circling overhead, who are captured finally overcoming their suspicions of this artificial mis-en-scene and descending to wreck havoc on the table. Drawing on the tradition of Vanitas painting and relying on the symbolic representation of vultures as ‘death, illness, dirt or war’, the film confronts the dark symbolism and unsavoury reputation of the vulture in Western circles, emphasised in the work by the superimposition of the dinner party setting onto the usual habits of the birds.

While the indispensible biological role of vultures as ‘cleaners of the fields’, which is distinct from ornithophobic cultural constructs, can also be articulated within the West­

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

ern framework, it does not however extend to the ‘multinatural perspectivism’ prac­ ticed in indigenous cultures, to use Viveiros de Castros term. In contrast to the Western assumption that although we inhabit different bodies, we experience the same world, indigenous perspectivism flows from the understanding that is not the bodies but the experience of the natural world that are different. In that sense, adopting the perspec­ tive of vultures, for whom ‘rotting food is sweet’, the Runa of the Amazon, with their attentiveness to the points of view and separate selves of other organisms that inhabit the forest, also come to ‘enjoy rotting fruit as if it were fresh.’24 James Prosek’s bird walls consist of black silhouettes of birds from specific habitats with accompanying numbers, referring to the exercises in field guides for birdwatch­ ers to practice accurate identification of species. However, the artist chose to omit the accompanying key, frustrating the viewer’s expectation to match the bird with its given name and proposing an alternative entry point to nature to the usual one based on identification. The critique of the ideology of scientific classification that since the enlightenment has divided humans from the natural world lies here in the realisation that, as John Berger put it, ‘the animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away we are.’25 Cor­ respondingly, in Prosek’s words, attention in his work is therefore directed towards ‘another kind of experience we can have in nature, an unnameable experience, where we observe without having to know what something is.’

The dynamic counterpoints between the anthropocentric tendency to perceive birds as metaphors or reduce them to scientific objects or consumable material, and the rival post-humanist affinity for intra-species dialogue comes to the fore in the work of London Fieldworks. Their film Between Premonition and Knowledge follows the walk of a hunter turned conservationist in the Atlantic rainforest of southeast Brazil, who shows off his bird mimicry skills. The artists’ decision not to capture the birds on film draws attention to the incommensurability of human and animal communication. In that respect, ad­ dressing the potential for interspecies dialogue, Eduardo Kohn concedes that ‘it is only through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multispecies relations are pos­ sible and also analytically comprehensible.’26 The disquieting absence of birds from the film also introduces an intimation of ecological endangeredness. Because there are ‘few­ er and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands’, environmentalist David Abram aptly observed how ‘human speech loses more and more of its evocative power,’ as driving ‘more 24 Kohn, How Forests Think, 126 and more of the land’s wild voices into 25 John Berger, Why look at animals? (London: Pen­ the oblivion of extinction’ means that our guin Books, 2009; first published 1980), 27. ‘own languages become increasingly im­ 26 Kohn, How Forests Think, 9. poverished and weightless, progressively 27 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 86. emptied of their earthly resonance.’27

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

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The suppositions of Western science and culture about the existence of an unbridge­ able divide between humans and animals have also contributed to rendering practices around hunting for food, trophies and fashion as well as animal experimentation so­ cially acceptable. Andrea Roe’s film Blackbird Menagerie however, in which a robot­ ised blackbird appears to react to a video recording of its own taxidermy, actively critiques the Cartesian reduction of animals to inert objects that function as machines and lack the ability to reason or show emotions. A challenge to the mechanistic view of non-human species as unthinking and unfeeling epitomised in the writings of the scientists of the enlightenment has also been uncovered in the unlikely location of the writings of Charles Darwin, who towards the end of his life was increasingly preoccu­ pied with ‘the social nature and even affectionate bonds’ he observed in other species, and came to believe that ‘cooperation, symbiosis and reciprocity’ rather than selfish competition were the key to survival.28 It is in the face of the longstanding tendency to objectify, exploit and project onto non­ human animals that many of the artists discussed in River Ecologies choose instead to explore instances of interspecies solidarity which ultimately derive from awareness of the shared predicament of planetary ecological crisis. Commenting on the impact of human interference with the planet in which humans are ‘driving animals and plants to extinction faster than they can evolve’, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan’s work focuses on instances of the ‘adaptation of wild populations to human-created condi­ tions.’ Juxtaposing incongruous news headlines with found images of nesting birds in unusual urban settings, their series of drawings Urban Wildlife help us imagine ways in which attention to the needs and rights of other organisms in the biosphere, as well as the unexpected agency and resilience of nonhuman species themselves, might po­ tentially call a halt to the juggernaut of capitalist growth and wrong-foot the dominant ideology of technocratic mastery.

With the mounting consciousness of the scale of the implications summarised in the concept of anthropocene, which takes into account the actual consequences of anthro­ pogenic interference in the planet’s climate and its geological matter, the unattain­ ability of the distinction not only between man and the natural world but also between natural history and human history comes fully to the fore. Only after the revelation of how the ‘geological now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty informed us, has it became possible to dispute theorists and historians long held insistence that geological time and the ‘chronology of human histories’ are unrelated.29 At the present stage of palpable ecological crisis, this separation is beginning to collapse, 28 See Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilisation which is of vital relevance for rethinking he Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Conscious­ness in a World in Crisis (Cambridge: the connections between human histo­ Polity Press, 2010), 91. ries and the histories of the river itself.

29 Dipsesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Within the project of River Ecologies, this Four Theses,’ Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), is also addressed from the point of view 212.v

20

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

of environmental art history, which is located at the juncture between artistic prac­ tices and the social, political and environmental events that have affected the river in its recent history.

The socialist megaproject to build a dam on the River Danube between Hungary and Czechoslovakia which was initiated in the 1970s with the intention to improve naviga­ bility, increase flood protection levels, and also use its hydropower for energy produc­ tion, had wide-reaching resonances in the social, political and environmental spheres of the countries concerned. As a result of serious public discontent with the effects of dam-building on the river and its surroundings, which became increasingly vocal in the following decade, the project was altered significantly so that in the end only one part of the system of dams was completed near Gabčikovo on the Slovak side of the border, with the Hungarians abandoning plans to dam the river at Nagymaros. The loudest criticism in Hungary was expressed through the civil initiative Danube Circle, which voiced ecological concerns and formulated environmental demands in congruence with a social and political agenda directed towards the socialist regime, culminating in mass protests in front of Parliament and contributing to the system change of 1989.

However, as artist Axel Braun demonstrated in his research into the circumstances of the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros development, an additional aspect to the protests was the also regular reference to ‘patriotic themes and national identity, by emphasising the destruction of symbolic scenery at the Danube Bend.’

This was not the case for the artistic actions that took place in 1991 in reaction to the Slovak side’s decision to continue the dam project, which rather than appeal­ ing to nationalist sentiment were directed instead towards expression of solidarity for other organisms also affected by the construction. Ilona Németh, as a young artist and activist studying in Budapest but living in Slovakia and regularly travelling between two of her native localities, acted as a kind of eco-messenger connecting both scenes.

Indicatively, in her work created on the side of the reservoir wall, she chose to paint large images of plant species, such as willows, that were put under threat by this con­ struction, visually protesting in the name of their cause. On the same occasion, József R. Juhász made a performance entitled Dunasaurus, in which he emerged out of an oxbow, a side arm of the Danube that was as a consequence of building works cut off from the rest of the river, wearing a diving suit and carrying a living fish in a plastic bag of water. He walked towards the police officer who was guarding the building site of the dam and informed him about the request from the fish to join its friends separated from each other in the process, however the permission was not granted. The artist’s alliance with the fish in front of the insensitive eyes of the authorities indicated not only the indifference of state apparatuses towards grassroots initiatives, but also put forward the issue of the rights of nature and its species.

Juhász also seized the opportunity to intervene into the entangled social, political and environmental domains during the great flood of the Danube in June 2013, when wear­

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

21

ing a black tie and holding an umbrella he stood on the overflowed embankment of the river in the centre of Budapest, not far from the Hungarian Parliament. The unan­ nounced performance was repeated several times during the day and night of 6 to 7th of June when the flood wave was at its peak, vividly showing the changes in the water levels and offering the passers-by a chance to speculate about the purpose of the spectacle. These discussions soon took on a viral form too, as the images started to appear on social network sites, accompanied by comments including one that read: Human Flood Level Indicator, which then became the title of the work. The image of the human figure solemnly standing exposed to the rising river, poignantly holding an umbrella to the dry skies, brings inevitable associations of how interlocked extreme weather conditions are with climate change, as well as of the force of the river itself, which were here emitted towards the unresponsiveness of official democratic institu­ tions, as well as into the online forums that could conceivably echo biosphere con­ sciousness.

Addressing the effects of globalisation on the Danube, and old as well as new colonis­ ers of the river, Michal Hvorecký’s novel Danube in America draws on the Slovak au­ thor’s personal experience of working on Danube cruise ships. The exploitative under­ belly of these oversize vessels, looking like ‘a dream dreamt up by high-volume river tourism’ and ‘a large water animal waiting to be fed’, are exposed with humour, as they ply their way down to the Black Sea, with their load of rich American tourists, her­ metically sealed from the social, ecological, as well as historical realities of the river.30 To the same degree that approaches to the river in the extended fields of the humani­ ties and contemporary art have opened up to its literal, ecological reality, a parallel shift can be felt in both environmental studies and the natural sciences. While aware­ ness of human responsibility for the negative transformations affecting the planet on a geological scale is affecting the agendas of artists, writers and researchers of all kinds, equally environmental scientists are no longer content to oscillate between empirical observation of discrete natural objects and devising technocratic strategies to man­ age the localised effects of pollution. Indeed, as theorist Bruno Latour remarked, in the wake of the anthropocene ‘the question of political relevance and urgency has spread from scholarly fields to hard sciences,’ with scientists increasingly liable to treat physi­ cal matter as ‘animated’ rather than parts of a ‘dead planet’, while abandoning the notion of ‘natural forces’ in a world so thoroughly ‘transmogrified’ by human actions.31 The agency of the river on the one hand and the human impact on its course on the other are the territories of enquiry for environmental historians, whose body of work, while still in the initial developing phase, increasingly shows the extent of the changes that fundamentally altered

22

30 Michal Hvorecky, The Danube in America (forth­

coming); published in German as Tod auf der Donau (Stuttgart: Tropen-Verlag Label von KlettCotta, 2014).

31 Bruno Latour, ‘Anthropology at the Time of the

Anthropocene - a personal view of what is to be studied,’ Distinguished lecture at the American Association of Anthropologists Washington, AAA 139 (December 2014), 7.

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

rivers’ histories once they entered the industrial age.32 This is especially apparent when considering the long span of river histories, when changes occurred at a slower pace, gradually and over much longer periods of time, despite the fact that human presence was always entangled with the river, relying on its energy, fish and flow and building settlements that affected its course. In that sense, the Danube experienced a similar chronology, with the project to ‘civilise’ the river taking off in the true spirit of the enlightenment and as result, as environmental historian Martin Schmid explained, the Danube has been regulated ‘all the way from Black Forest to the Black Sea almost without interruption.’ Despite the fact that since then the transformations of the Dan­ ube have accelerated causing loss of natural habitats as well as of particular knowl­ edges that existed for generations, he cautions that environmental history is ‘not a nostalgia’, and there is no need to think of the river in terms of loss.

In that sense, an alternative approach to the ‘narratives of loss and decline’ that are characteristic of literary accounts of river history is explored by environmental his­ torian Peter Coates, who while not disputing the dismal record of ‘manipulation and ruination’, ‘biological impoverishment’ and destruction of the ‘free-flowing wildness’ of rivers, chooses instead to emphasis ‘what rivers have done to us.’ His fluviocentric account is based on an understanding of river agency that goes beyond acknowl­ edging the tendency of rivers to leave their mark by overcoming flood defences to encompass the ‘reciprocity’ between the ‘will of the river’ and the ‘human response’ it triggers. The shift to a fluviocentric perspective is illustrated by the preference for the ‘view from under the bridge,’ by which the ‘materiality of the natural world’ can be unearthed from the ‘dense layers of socio-cultural construction’ under which genera­ tions of scholars and writers have buried it.

The idea of releasing the materiality of the natural world from the confines of perva­ sive socio-cultural constructs, which could be seen as another way of conceptualising the decolonisation of thought, combined with attention to the experiential knowledge brought by unmediated immersion in wilderness suggested by sensuous scholarship, are among the main currents of River Ecologies. This collective inquiry is also directed towards the rethinking of social, artistic and planetary responsibility in the light of the new conditions of ecological crisis. The question of responsibility has been raised by Bruno Latour, who took a decisive step away from the intellectual traditions of scien­ tific disinterestedness and artistic aloofness by making a causal link between ‘human agency’ on the geological level and the realisation that consequently humans should also be considered as ‘moral agents.’33 While various kinds of agency have been dis­

covered in animals, rivers and across our animate world, today when it comes to con­sidering human agency, it is not the technological achievements of our spe­ cies but rather the morality of our actions on a planetary level that are at stake.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

32 See for instance the manmade changes on Volga, the longest European river in, Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

33 Latour, ‘Anthropology at the Time of the Anthro­ pocene,’ 4.

23

Acknowledging responsibility for the current ecological crisis is perhaps a necessary stage on the hesitant path to changing prevailing attitudes and behaviours towards the natural world. The expectation expressed by Jeremy Rifkin that ‘at some critical point, the realisation will set in that we share a common planet,’ triggering the spread of a ‘collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere’ to create the conditions for ‘bio­ sphere consciousness’ is perhaps the only positive spin that can be put on the ever more visible signs of climate change.34 In this sense it is awareness of the high stakes of the current period of planetary uncertainty that motivates many of the artistic endeavours brought together in River Ecologies, while exploring the diverse challenges of living in ecological times also opens up space to consider whether the current political, economic and environmental predicament might hold out the prospect of a sustainable transfor­ mation of global society. Artists are at the forefront of devising ways to navigate the dilemmas of living and working in a world system that seems chronically out of touch with ecological realities, so could it be that through their practices and approach to the world they might be able to act as guides to the streams of biosphere responsibility?

The desire to maintain ‘coherence between our thought and out acts’ is how John Jor­ dan and Isa Fremeaux explain many of the personal and artistic decisions made with the Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, their collective dedicated to ‘disman­ tling the system of capitalism and domination.’ From refusing the contradictions of the metropolitan art world and moving to the countryside to set up an organic farm and commune, to not taking flights for more than a decade and turning down invitations to participate in fossil-fuel funded art events, they have been guided throughout by the principle of not separating ‘our aesthetics from our ethics.’ The ecological stance of Tamás Kaszás, who works collaboratively with Anikó Loránt as Ex-Artists Collective, derives from his understanding of the depth of the systemic crisis facing the world in which urban, industrialised civilisation is headed towards collapse and is expressed through experiments in modelling alternative scenarios based on the insights of folk culture and the cultivation of a survivalist, DIY aesthetic. Operating at the intimate level of a ‘tribal way of thinking’ and focusing on the local so as to ‘protect diversity’, he treats the white cube as a ‘laboratory for aimless experiments’ to lay a path to a future of non-institutionalised creativity within a permaculture setting.

The aspect of responsibility that comes to the fore within Cecilya Malik’s practice is concentrated on the bioregion of her native city of Krakow where she directed her spe­ cial attention to its rivers. Collaboratively initiating the Critical Water Mass, the artist set out to reclaim the Vistula, the largest Polish river that flows through the centre of Krakow, for its citizens. By inviting them to make their own vessels and autonomously embark on its waters, the artist chose to break social conventions in order to ‘be ben­ eficial for this particular community.’ In another of her related projects, Six Rivers, she focussed on the other five rivers that are less accessible but also belong to Krakow’s waterways by highlighting ‘a completely unfamiliar perspective’ of her home city.

34 Rifkin, Empathic Civilisation, 616.

24

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Also related to water environments, but commenting on it from the point of view of the technological transformation that has affected the sensory experience of nature, Lise Autogena’s collaborative project Foghorn Requiem entailed staging a concert between an orchestra and foghorns of lighthouses and distant ships to reconnect people with a familiar coastal sound at the moment of its disappearance. The ‘transformative experi­ ence’ of growing up in experimental commune of Christiania, and its ‘self-organised, self-build approach to urban living’, was for the artist a major impulse not only in her practice, but also in the lifestyle choice of co-founding a ‘cooperative harbour’ on the Thames in London.

Fernando Garcia-Dory distinguishes the common ‘predator mode’ of society that en­ courages impulses for accumulation and exploitation and counteracts it with the invi­ tation to ‘appreciate the existing beauty of the phenomena around us.’ This is reflect­ ed in his practice through his desire to achieve a symbiotic relationship to the environ­ ment and learn skills that are highly specific, such as the knowledge of shepherds.

In that way, he explores the untapped potential for creating spaces of ‘autonomous thinking and production’ that are characteristic of peasant cultures. Operating both on the micro level of particular local ecologies and at the global scale of the environ­ mental impact of extractivism, Ursula Biemann’s collaborative project Forest Law is a parallel exploration of the biodiversity of the rainforest, the ethno-cultural diversity of its indigenous peoples and the high stakes struggle to enact the legal protection of wilderness. It is not just the interconnectedness of specific ecologies and their human and nonhuman inhabitants that is highlighted in her practice, but also the invisible and even deliberately hidden links between the survival of particular fragments of the biosphere and the effects of global policies, human actions and planetary systems.

River Ecologies serves as an alluvial plain in which contemporary art spills over into the environmental humanities to rethink the relation to the natural world. This entailed opening up to the rewilding of mentalities through experiential scholarship, liberating knowledge from theoretical constraints, while integrating natural and human stories into an environmental pool in which multispecies and multinatures coexist. The Dan­ ube was a surface for reflection as well as an active co-creator in this collaborative endeavour that flows towards a renewed understanding of biosphere responsibility and collective exploration of the implications of planetary agency.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

25

1 26

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

rewilding mentalities 27

Peter Coates

Fluvio-centric (and more cheerful) currents of river history In the fifth century BC, Greek historian Herodotus characterized Egypt as the ‘gift of the Nile’: the river’s annual September floods - the tears of the goddess, Isis - nurtured the rich soils of a fertile vertical corridor through the desert that nurtured three vital crops: wheat, flax and papyrus. But a more realistic way of looking at the material contributions of rivers to human life is to see them as an extracted service, such as labour, rather than as spontaneous gifts. From a geomorphological standpoint, a river is always a ‘working’ river, intent on washing mountains down to the sea; and forever a work in progress. However, the transformative role that humans have played is more immediately apparent than the geological, especially over the past two centuries – and it is this human intervention that renders a river a servant as well as a god- to use the terminology of a nineteenth-century French geographer.1 Élisée Reclus did not refer to rivers as slaves or characterize their status as enslaved.

But for many environmentalists today – whether or not they actually use the term – enslavement is the condition to which many rivers have been effectively reduced. For many environmental historians as well, how we have tamed, harnessed, rearranged and degraded rivers epitomizes the extent and abuse of human authority over the rest of nature. The control of a great river through a mega-dam such as the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, first proposed in 1919 and finally completed in 2008, is undeni­ ably one of the most powerful advertisements of collective human prowess and the muscle of the central state (as well as a striking example of the technological sublime, informed by the ethos of ‘high modernism’ that transcends national boundaries and political ideologies2).

So it is not surprising that a substantial amount of recent commentary on rivers excori­ ates this record of manipulation and ruination, deploring the biological impoverish­ ment, the loss of free-flowing wildness, 1 Élisée Reclus, The Earth: A Descriptive History of the disruption of adjacent floodplains, and, the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe (New York, sometimes, the dislocation of the human 1879), 382. populations that share riparian lands. In 2 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Ma., 1996) and James C. Scott, See2000, the US rock musician, Don Henley, ing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve released ‘Goodbye to a River’ - a lament the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 5. about a river ‘running wild’ that was ‘put

28

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

in a box’ with lakes, levees, dams and locks, by men that ‘must have control’.3 Henley borrowed his elegiac song’s title from a poignant book (1960) by a fellow Texan, John Graves, who characterized himself as ‘river-minded’ and wrote about the imminent emasculation of his beloved Texan river, the Brazos, by a series of dams.

Graves dedicated Goodbye to a River to his daughter, in the hope that ‘the world she will know will still have a few rivers and other quiet things in it’. This narrative of loss and decline to which Graves and Henley subscribe is often described by historians as declensionist: in other words, the historical flow of a river’s fortunes is literally down­ hill. The belief that many rivers have become not only diminished but even defunct is encapsulated in the apocalyptic titles of books from the 1990s on the Colorado and the Columbia, two of North America’s most intensively regulated major rivers: A River No More; A River Lost; and All My Rivers Are Gone.4 All My Rivers Are Gone is dedicated to ‘The Once and Future Glen Canyon with its FreeFlowing Colorado River’, and speaks of a ‘crucified’ river. The author of A River Lost, who­­se father helped build Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s, deplores the Columbia’s reduction, by the early 1990s, to ‘a chain of slow-moving puddles’.5 The sub-title ac­ tually refers to the river’s ‘life’ and ‘death’. This genre of river scholarship rightly ex­ poses how humans squander the natural capital assets that rivers represent to use the language of ‘ecosystem services’. Unfortunately, this approach also reinforces the divide between notions of the natural and the unnatural; ‘a natural and unnatural his­ tory’ appears as the sub-title for books on the Hudson (1969) and the Chicago River (2000). The front cover of the Chicago River book presents this dichotomy in stark visual terms: the upper half depicts a green, tranquil and timeless ‘natural’ scenario devoid of human input and impact. Meanwhile, the lower half portrays a bustling but denatured, brown and discoloured urban-industrial river.6 This perpetuates not only a rigid conceptual juxtaposition between the natural and the unnatural but also posits an equally unhelpful ‘before and after‘ 3 John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative scenario.

(New York, 1960), 8. Graves undertook the 175The ‘before and after’ scenario has been a particularly distinctive feature of the writ­ ing of river history in areas of the world col­ onized by Europeans. ‘Before’ effectively means ‘before Europeans’. Frequently al­ lied to the ‘before the Europeans’ mental­ ity is the notion of the virtual river. Fluvial ecologist Ellen Wohl introduced this con­ cept in 2001 to denote a river that looks natural (pristine even), but whose diverse physical form has been heavily modified and which has been stripped of most of its

Peter Coates

4

5

6

mile canoe trip on which the book is based in the autumn of 1957.

On ‘Histories of the Dead River’, see Terje Tvedt and Eva Jacobsson, ‘Introduction: Water History is World History’, in A History of Water: Volume 1: Water Control and River Biographies, eds. Tvedt and Jakobsson (London, 2006), xix-xx.

Philip L. Fradkin, A River No More: The Colorado River and the West (Berkeley, 1996); Katie Lee, All My Rivers Are Gone: A Journey of Discovery Through Glen Canyon (Boulder, Co., 1998), xi; Blaine Harden, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (New York, 1997), 13.

Robert Boyle, The Hudson: A Natural and Unnatural History (New York, 1969); Libby Hill, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Chicago, 2000).

29

equally diverse ecosystem functions. Yet, an ecological narrative based on the ‘sim­ plifications of river form and function’ is of restricted value as a way of writing river history.7 Wohl’s distinction between a river ‘in the truest sense’ and other rivers offers a blunt tool for historical analysis. Treating rivers first and foremost as our victims also limits our insights. ‘Cry me a river’, sang Julie London in 1955 (six years before Ella Fitzgerald recorded the song). But crying a river over a river does nobody much good.

In this essay, I am less concerned with what we have done to rivers than with what rivers have done to us. And I am most interested in what we do with rivers – together with rivers, that is. Without being glib, flippant or complacent, I would like to emphasize change rather than destruction, and the production of new and different rivers rather than non-rivers, lost rivers, dead rivers or silenced rivers. As the environmental histo­ rian Richard White emphasized back in 1995, even thoroughly transformed rivers are ‘organic machines’. White writes of the re-making rather than the destruction or loss of the Columbia, which is an energy system that retains its ‘unmade’ attributes. The river has not vanished. Nor has it been killed. And it retains its capacity to shape human af­ fairs. To adopt the terminology common among the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, first nature remains active within a human-fashioned ‘second nature’.8 Regardless of whether they contain more first or more second nature, we routinely imbue rivers with human qualities. This habit is particularly entrenched among writers of popular history; lazy, wandering, impatient, ill-tempered, unruly, devious and capri­ cious are standard – and often gender-specific – qualities attached to rivers.9 And a favourite opening gambit for books is: ‘if the river could speak’. Writers of fiction also habitually personify rivers. In Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The River’s Tale, a history of the Thames narrated by the Thames itself, the river relates how the ‘earliest Cockney’ trapped my beavers at Westminster’, ‘caught my salmon’ and ‘killed my herons off Lambeth Pier’.10 Yet recent academic writers of environmental history are also suscep­ tible to this tendency. In his ‘eco-biography’ of the Rhine, Mark Cioc refers to the ‘per­ sonality’ of a river, which appears ‘alive to us restless, temperamental, fickle, some­ times raging, sometimes calm’. Rivers, he 7 Ellen E. Wohl, Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the explains, do things like burst their banks Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range and ‘pour into shops and cellars, wreak­ (New Haven, 2001), ix-x, 34-37.

11 ing havoc like vandals in the night’.

8

Making due allowance for literary license and crude anthropomorphism, rivers un­ deniably possess character. But are they also protagonists in what has been dub­ bed a ‘wet book of history’?12 Histo­ri­cal studies of rivers are thick on the gro­und.

Yet the rivers themselves tend to feature more or less as an inert backdrop to the main action and spectacle, which is gen­

30

9

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum, vol.

2(2 vols), ed. Arthur Stanley Pease (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 1028.

Carl N. Tyson, The Red River in Southwestern History (Norman, OK, 1981), pp. 9, 181, 184; Henry Clune, The Genesee (New York, 1963), p. 28; Thom­ as L. Stokes, The Savannah (New York, 1951), 12.

10 C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, A History of England (New York, 1911), 4.

11 Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 18152000 (Seattle, 2002),5-6.

12 I have borrowed this phrase from J.E. Allison,The Mersey Estuary (Liverpool, 1949), 12.

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

erated by the power of people. Until the last decade or so, few river writers adopted the policy of the author of book on the Hudson, published in 1939: ‘I have tried to keep as near to the stream as I could’. Nor have those who write about rivers with famous cities on their banks heeded the advice of the author of a book (1941) about a small river in Pennsylvania: that though the Thames made London, its history is not (just) the history of London.13 Even studies that ostensibly place rivers at centre stage such as Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: Sacred River (2007) - are rather dry.14 Dry in the sense that transcendental and metaphysical meanings overshadow tangible presence. And dry in that a dynamic liquid entity is drained of its life and vigour. This is particularly surpris­ ing given the more explicit sub-title chosen for the US edition: The Biography (2009).

In 1962, in his book on totemism in the tribal societies of the Pacific Northwest of North America, Claude Levi-Strauss remarked that animals are not only ‘“good to eat”’ but also “‘good to think’” – by which he meant good to think with.15 Rivers are also very good and very interesting to think with. Yet, like animals, rivers are even better and more interesting to live with. Their significance for scholars in the arts and humanities does not begin and end with what they mean to us in their role as raw material for hu­ man thought. Taking my cue from Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, I’m curious about how rivers co-produce our historical narratives.16 For the pioneering social historian E.P. Thompson, history was no co-production. He had no doubts about what produces history: ‘Men make their own history. They are part agents, part victims: it is precisely this element of agency which distinguishes them from the beasts, which is the human part of man’. If they were merely creatures, then, just like ants, people would simply be ‘adjusting their society to upheavals in the ter­ rain’.17 Since this pronouncement over half a century ago, thanks to the intervention of environmental historians, the debate over 13 Henry Seidel Canby, The Brandywine (New York, agency has moved on to a fresher, earth­ 1941), 3.

18 ier stage. Some stubbornly human-cen­ 14 Carmer, Hudson, preface. tred historians still maintain that the very 15 Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney notion of non-human agency is funda­ Needham (London, 1964 [1962]), 89. mentally flawed; because consciousness, 16 Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (and Other Stories) (London, 1976), 1-104. rationality, intentionality and the exercise of choice are faculties that humans alone 17 E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines’, New Reasoner (1957), 122. possess - not to mention the facility to 18 Ted Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, record and explain actions and events in and Power in History’, The American Historiverbal and/or written form.19 cal Review 107/3 (2002), pp. 768-820; Richard One response is to question the indispens­ ability of the qualities of rationality and the notion of agency. Another way for­ ward is to distinguish between ‘thoughtful agency’ (Francis Gooding’s term for hu­

Peter Coates

C. Foltz, ‘Does Nature have Historical Agency?

World History, Environmental History, and How Historians Can Help Save the Planet’, The History Teacher 37/1 (November 2003), 9-28.

19 William H. Sewell, ‘Nature, Agency, and Anthro­ pocentrism’, post dated 7 September 2002, at

http://www.historycooperative.org/phorum/read. php?13,271,271

31

man agency) and a more elastic concept of non-reflective agency that really boils down to a capacity to shape outcomes; animal geographers Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert refer to this as ‘the power to act’.20 In short, actors do not have to be rational, let alone intel­ ligent. They simply have to be effective. Moreover, to categorize a river as an inanimate form of nature seems like a flagrant denial of reality. A river has a life and a life history in more than just the strictly scientific sense.

The notion of fluvial agency (in other than geological terms) does seem easiest to grasp in terms of the disruption and transgression that informs Cioc’s analogy with vandals wreaking havoc. A river that persists in overflowing its banks, in defiance of flood con­ trol measures, provides its own emphatic response to those who point out that it cannot communicate in ways we recognize or leave a record we can interpret. Inhabitants of a settlement inundated by floodwater (such as the residents of Budapest in March 1838 or June 2013) will laugh at the suggestion that a river cannot make its mark.

An additional perspective on agency, perhaps the most fruitful, casts off the oppo­ sitional mentality – that either a river or the people that use and change it exercise primary authority. The French theorist, Bruno Latour, and the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold, argue that agency is best handled as an attribute widely distributed among people and non-human nature in the form of associational ‘actor-networks’. They offer this hybrid schema as a replacement for the obfuscating dichotomies of culture and nature as well as a substitute for antiquated notions of agency as a human monopoly.

As Latour explains - though he has objects in mind rather than natural entities like rivers – it is not a choice between a non-human actor dictating an outcome or being a passive, acted on element; after all, kettles ‘boil’ water, locks ‘close’ doors and knives ‘cut’ meat. There are many gradations between ‘full causality and sheer inexistence’, he observes; a non-human thing has a range of capabilities: it can ‘authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influ­ 20 Francis Gooding, ‘Of Dodos and Dutchmen: Re­ ence, block, render possible, forbid’.21 As flections on the Nature of History’, Critical QuarLinda Nash points out, relations between terly 47/4 (2005), 33; Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London, 2002), 30-31; Chris Philo and Chris humans and non-humans are defined by Wilbert, ‘Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: An Introa reciprocity that not only conditions hu­ duction’ in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New man ‘actions’ but also moulds human ‘in­ Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, eds.

Philo and Wilbert (London, 2000), 16. tentions’:22 a river expresses its will and 21 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Inthereby triggers a human response.

Ingold invites us to re-consider the human being as an ‘organism-in-its-environ­ment’ rather than as an autonomous (‘discrete’ and ‘bounded’) being which faces an exter­ nal environment composed of non-human elements that ‘leaves its basic, internally specified nature unaffected’.23 Agency, in

32

troduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York, 2005),pp. 71-; id., We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge. Mass., 1991), 1-3.

22 Linda Nash, ‘The Agency of Nature or the Nature

of Agency?’, Environmental History 10/1 (January 2005), 67-68.

23 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment:

Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York, 2000), 3-4, 19, 396; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2, 22, 109, 111, 114-15.

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

other words, resides in the linkages and relations between network elements, rather than within the network’s individual components. By taking a relational approach to the River Mersey and its catchment in northwest England, for instance, we gain a sharper understanding of why the industrial revolution began in that part of the world - and a better appreciation of why the sub-title of Ian Wray’s book about the Mersey (2007), ‘the river that changed the world’ is not as preposterous as it might initially appear.24 Whether or not we are ready to grant agency to a river, either in traditional terms, or within the context of Latour and Ingold’s understandings, few will dispute that rivers matter. When a settlement is founded in a particular place because of the advantages a river supplies, this is an unambiguous demonstration of fluvial authority. We should give credit where and when it is due by distinguishing between those who wield power and the instrument through which that power is exercised. The proper answer to the question ‘who irrigates the field?’, surely, is ‘the river and those who harness its wa­ ter’. And if a river’s propensity to burst its banks prompts the implementation of flood control measures, this is another clear demonstration of its authority. Rivers illustrate the limits of our power as well as our unbounded technological prowess and enormous capacity to foul the natural world to within a whisker of its life.

Regarding what rivers have done to us, their influence over creative minds is particu­ larly striking. ‘The power of water over the minds of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages’, reflected William Wordsworth in the preface to a series of sonnets he wrote about his wanderings along the Duddon, a river in his beloved Lake District.25 When a river inspires a poet to write a poem, the arresting river is the pro­ tagonist as well as the poet. This is what I call the view from under the bridge.

The river that flowed beneath the bridge that features in Arthur Miller’s play, A View From the Bridge (1955), was entirely incidental to the plot. The view from the Brooklyn Bridge, which spans the East River, is of the community of Red Hook, a slummy neigh­ bourhood populated by Italian immigrants fresh off the boat who work in Brooklyn’s shipyards, on the bridge’s seaward side. Despite Miller’s lack of interest in rivers as co-producers, let us consider the difference between a view from the bridge and a view from underthe bridge. A fluvio-centric approach builds on the notion of ‘liquid history’, a charismatic term applied to the Thames in 1921 by John Burns, a proud Londoner and citizen of the Thames. My approach seeks to invest the concept of liquid his­ tory with genuine physical meaning. Burns 24 Ian Wray, ed. Mersey: The River that Changed explained to an American visitor who the World (Liverpool, 2007). thought the Thames was rather pathetic 25 William Wordsworth, The River Duddon, A Series in size compared to great North American of Sonnets; Vaudracour and Julia; and Other Poems (London, 1820), ‘Postscript’, 38-39. rivers like the Mississippi and St. Lawrence 26 eRound Table Knights’, The Times, 27 June 1921, that ‘we do not call [the Thames] a river, p. 14; John L. Gardiner, ed. River Projects and we call it liquid history’.26 In other words, Conservation: A Manual for Holistic Appraisal he largely ignored its biophysical identity: (Chichester, 1991), 165.

Peter Coates

33

Andreas Müller-Pohle, The Danube River Project, Budapest, 2005.

but we should call a river a river as well. Many arts and humanities scholars have bur­ ied the materiality of the natural world under dense layers of socio-cultural construc­ tion. The environmental historian’s re-emphasis on the materiality of the environment is part of a wider material turn, a fresh look at the thing-ness of objects, whether animate or inanimate.

My source of inspiration came a few years ago, in Berlin, when I visited a photography exhibition on the Danube. The photos had toured the river’s major cities between 2006 and 2008. Now, in November 2008, as part of the third annual European Month of Pho­ tography, they were display in the photographer’s home town. What struck me about these river photos by Andreas Müller-Pohle was their perspective. The vantage point of the river photographer is usually that of the bank or the bridge. In stark contrast, MüllerPohle’s pictures were either shot at or below water level. Looking up at the underside of a bridge, we feel pulled in. The Danube is defined by its water, which is typically an energetic, boisterous, ever changing medium. Müller-Pohle stepped into the water and took underwater shots with a camera housed in a watertight box, against which the water slaps. Three-quarters of some photos are underwater, providing real depth. The river occupies the foreground and riverside buildings are firmly in the background.

Not only does the viewer feel drawn into the river; it sometimes feels like the water is falling toward us. In one particularly striking photo, the Hungarian Parliament build­ ing in Budapest seems about to be engulfed by a tidal wave. As a Bulgarian cultural

34

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Andreas Müller-Pohle, The Danube River Project, Novi Sad, 2005.

anthropologist reflected in the companion book: ‘Nature is close, immediate, insolent, unpredictably blocking the view at various degrees’. The leading protagonist is the ‘heavy materiality’ of water.27 People are largely absent from Müller-Pohle’s photos. One shot contains a lar­gely sub­ merged lower leg and foot and another features two calves (they belong to one of his daughters).That is the closest we get to an overt, bodily human pre­sence. And yet, every photo contains evidence of human activity. At each location he photographed, Müller-Pohle took a water sample. This ‘blood test’ provi­ded information, displayed as a data bar at the bottom of each image, about con­centrations of nitrates, phosphate, potassium, cadmium, mercury and lead, as well as the water’s TOC (total organic carbon) value and its conductivity (the 27 Ivaylo Ditchev, ‘The Danube Frontier’, in Andreas total load of dissolved ionic compounds).

Müller-Pohle, The Danube River Project (Berlin, Not even near its source in rural south­ 2007), 13. The Danube Project consisted of eighty photos selected from over 4,000 taken west Germany is the Danube without its at 21 locations during four field trips between burden of contaminants. Full immersion July and November 2005; a ten-minute video projection of the river’s surface at Dunaújváros, in rivers, whose wet splashy character Hungary; and a twelve-minute soundtrack of an has been restored, promotes a perspec­ underwater recording at Kilometre Zero (Sulina, Romania), extracted from five hours of recording tive that dislodges people from their en­ with a device wedged into the silt: http://www.riv­ trenched position within the study of the erproject.net/danube/downloads.htmlhttp://www. riverproject.net/danube/downloads.html. past. But this river bottom-up point of

Peter Coates

35

view does not submerge, let alone drown the human element. What this perspective encourages us to do is to think like a river, which, in turn, promotes river adaptive­ ness. These notions were introduced in a study of the hydraulic society shaped by the large scale manipulation of river water in the twentieth-century American West. Don­ ald Worster meant by ‘river-adaptiveness’ was the adjustment of society, culture and economy to natural hydrological flows. Not that this was an easy task to accomplish: ‘To use a river without violating its intrinsic qualities will require much of us. It will re­ quire our learning to think like a river, our trying to become a river-adaptive people’.28 The main thrust of this essay can be summarized as follows: scholars can place rivers in the foreground without reviving a rightly discredited environmental determinism; rivers can be highlighted without substituting an environment-centric narrative for a human-centric narrative; rivers can be infused with spirit and character without laps­ ing into incorrigible personification. We can rise to the challenge of thinking like a river.

And this exercise in empathy can be pursued without abdicating to a quasi-humanized ‘river’s voice’.29

28 Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the

Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 331.‘Thinking like a river’ was adapted from Aldo Leopold, ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, in A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1949), 132. Worster first explored it in his essay ‘Thinking Like a River, in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1984), 123-34.

29 The River’s Voice (Totnes, Devon, 2000) is an

anthology of poetry edited by Angela King and Susan Clifford.

36

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Vlad Basalici, Ursula Biemann, Reuben Fowkes, Maja Fowkes

Conversation with frogs

RF: What could we learn as artists, curators or art professionals from the river and what can we gather from the fact that humans and nature, people and animals, seem to get along fairly well together in the Delta, that there seems to be quite a good sym­ biosis here? Just like the cats and the dogs in the garden where we’re staying seem to get along okay.

UB: It’s striking how I keep thinking of many other places, because I feel totally dislo­ cated, ripped out of my normal environment. I’ve been put in a rather wild space here, so I’m thinking about some of these other places that have to do with water, the Ban­ gladesh Delta, or the Nile Delta, which is somewhere I’ve been working on a project re­ cently. Actually it’s a lot wilder here, the vegetation is a lot stronger, it’s not so heavily populated, and the people who live here, they live very close to nature. The Delta we

River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014

Conversation with frogs

37

saw today by boat, going through these reeds and endless forest areas, it seems quite unexploited by people, except maybe for some fishing, so it’s left almost on its own, which is rare. I think the people here have a very soft way of interacting with the river.

MF: The

social and political history of this region is very distinctive, shaping human interactions with the natural environment in unpredictable ways. Could it be that the experience of 40 years of dictatorship is in a way reflected here in people’s gentler attitude to nature?

VB: There

is an ongoing discussion here about the place of people in the Delta and that they should not be seen just as part of nature. The fishermen for example are afraid they’ll become part of an open-air museum and will lose their freedom to inter­ vene. Basically I think life in the communist period was the same, but the outlook has changed, as since the ‘90s there has been more demand to exploit the fish in a free market economy. Because I was born here, I have something in common with other people who were born here, which is a kind of paradox. Now that I’m thirty-six, I am able reflect on that past and shared background, however I’m also aware that the way people live here, this condition of life, is more natural than mine.

RF: I would like to think about the form of a River School. We have had all kinds of discussions that reference current theories and developments in the art world. What happens when you take those discussions and you have them here, against the set­ ting of a concert of frogs in the background? What does it do to those ideas? Do they change when they meet this more natural situation?

UB: Yes, I think that the politics of the moment consists in including all these different

voices…When you’re here, you’re part of this ecology, but when you bring it to another space, you rip it out and bring it to another temporality. When I do fieldwork and cre­ ate knowledge it is part of this ecological production, but an artist also becomes a link between different systems.

VB: I always separate art practice and activism. My work is mostly based around the issue of time, while activism for me is protests against genetically modified or­ ganisms, against fracking and gold mining, as well as campaigning for cycling. I agree that it’s important to see everything as an ecosystem, but we should at the same time treat everything individually, as an individual element of that system.

MF: What interests me is whether it’s possible at all for someone who comes from a

theoretically informed background to be in nature without imposing an additional layer of content? Can we just come and be immersed, or are we stuck in our world of con­ necting theories and networks? One can feel here that we are in a bio reserve, with so many species around us. You feel the incredible biodiversity as you go from one lake to another, and each is another landscape, another habitat.

38

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014

UB: The

wilderness it’s alive, it’s all alive, it’s all living, it’s full of action, and it’s all completely independent from us, it’s just happening out there. Living in the age of the anthropocene, I like to think about the world as a whole system, a whole entity, and it interests me a lot to think of the whole earth as alive, which is a completely different thing to thinking there’s nature around, and we can maybe exploit it. There’s a whole other shift of consciousness when you start to think about the entire planet, because of the density, because of the biodiversity, because it’s so loud.

RF: I’m very struck by the history of the Delta, and the fact that what we see here is

the result of a very long process, starting in the Black Forest and then growing into a huge river, with all the interactions with animals, with people, with cities, along the way.

Considering everything that has happened to the river, to its waters, at the end it still seems the Delta has the power to absorb it all, to create and maintain this incredible ecosystem. I’m sure it’s affected by the pollution and the dams, but you feel somehow the strength of the river, its resilience, and ability to absorb what’s happening upstream.

UB: I think the river is a bit like an archive that registers all these changes. Although

there is power, natural power, there is also damage that cannot be repaired.

Conversation with frogs

39

VB: Can you as curators imagine what a project that archived the Delta would look like?

MF: It might be easier to imagine what an artistic archive of the Delta would look like,

than what a curatorial archive of the Delta would be. This is why going as curators on a research trip to a place like this is completely experimental. What very much interests us is the openness to the wilderness. Instead of having it all worked out in advance, this excursion was intended to be experiential and we learn a lot from artistic practices about negotiating these positions. Although we’ve read a lot about the Danube and its cultural, political and natural history, we did not want to impose it on onto the experi­ ence of actually being here.

RF: I think there are a lot of things that are hidden or invisible, just like the history of an individual molecule of water as it comes down the river. Each individual bird that we see has its own history of migration and that also goes for people, both the con­ temporary forms of migration, of the people who leave to work abroad and then come back, and those who were forced to migrate throughout history, who also left traces on the landscape and interacted with the river in the past. Artistic, curatorial as well as art historical research could help to being these things to the surface and enrich our understanding of the fluvial now.

River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Ursula Biemann

Immersed in amphibian worlds MRF: You have worked in locations around the planet, from Bangladesh to Egypt, Greenland and Ecuador – how would you compare your experience of the Danube Delta?

UB: Moving around the Danube Delta by car, on foot, and by boat was a beautiful experi­ ence but it doesn’t quite compare to those other locations you mention. The motivation for travelling to those places directly relates to the research and recording for a specific video project involving interviews with experts and visits to particularly relevant sites.

Although there is a designated purpose, I always keep my mind open to chance en­ counters and sensorial dimensions that exceed the knowledge that one could acquire by reading and learning about an environment ahead of time. In the Danube Delta we were simply invited to be immersed in an amphibian world for a few days and become alert observers.

MRF: How could one visit a part of the natural environmental without taking an extractivist approach? Is immersion possible? Could we consider ourselves, as anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it, ‘an organism-in-its-environment,’ rather than as separated from the external, nonhuman environment? Could we think with the river, as we are asked to think with the forest?

UB: Given that we didn’t follow a sharply defined purpose, it was certainly easier to delve into experiential mode and open the senses to the thick thereness of this world ma­ de of water and sounds.

Floating along these ancient human-made tunnels through sub­mergeíd forests didn’t feel like an esca­pe into nature, cul­ ture was always present some­ how, but the delta is a quiet landscape, one where humans haven’t made too many dis­ turbing incisions. I felt part of a human-nature-ecology. I tried to grasp the general eventful­ Ursula Biemann, Presentation at tranzit.ro Bucharest, May 2014 ness of this place rat­her than

Ursula Biemann

41

produce a particular kind of knowl­ edge. But to more deeply en­ gage with a natural environment and be­ gin a process of knowing through a direct material engagement, to come to grips with that entangle­ ment of knowing and being that you speak about, it would need a more focused approach on my part. Pro­ cesses of knowing implicate us in the configuration of the living envi­ ronment. If we are to follow Eduardo Kohn’s semiotics laid out in How Forests Think, we just have to recognize that humans are not the only beings involved in semiosis and thinking.

All other beings are equally engaged in generating reality through similar processes. This embeds us in a larg­ er fabric or thinking selves.

MRF: How do we bring the sense of empathy we feel with the natural world in the age of the anthropocene into the institutional art world?

UB: I see several points of entries to the project of decentering the hegemony of the humans. For some of these tasks we can draw on the practices and theories devel­ oped in gender and postcolonial studies whose aim is to overcome the discrimination of difference within the human species. To tackle the nature-culture divide is a logical con­tinuation of this effort. But this time we don’t stay within the humanities, we ex­ pand into territories of natural science and physics to develop new philosophical and aesthetic models with which we can operate in the natural-aesthetic-causal world we inhabit. The very fact that you ask these questions means that we have already begun the process. Personally I feel that an expansion of our larger sense of belonging to a living planet necessarily has to take place on the legislative level as well. Hence I see works that inspire universal rights of nature to be of great importance at this moment, whether they take place inside or outside institutions.

River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Ursula Biemann, Forest Law, film stills, 2014

Ursula Biemann

43

Vlad Basalici

The stream ecology of life MRF: The Danube Delta is a familiar environment for you, as you were born and grew up there. How was it to re encounter it as part of an artistic excursion?

VB: I was born in Tulcea, the last city before the Danube Delta starts, but until my adult life, I went to the Delta not more than five times. When I was ten year old, my parents sent me to some distant relatives who were fishermen in Gorgova village.

During communism it was forbidden to bring fish from the Delta as a private person.

The police made searches from time to time on passengers on the ship between Tul­ cea and Sulina, so my parents sent me alone because it was improbable that a child’s luggage would be checked. I spent three days here. I learnt how to paddle from an old fisherman on Lake Gorgova and I participated in pike fishing with long nets. A part of the catch was sold to me. The fish wasn’t for our consumption. When you had a health problem and you went for a clinical examination in Bucharest, it was taken for granted that if you are from Tulcea, you must bring a bag of fish or a jar with roe, as a gift for doctors. Before ‘89, you could only find in Tulcea’s stores fro­ zen oceanic fish from IPO, the Oce­ anic Fishing Company, where my fa­ ther worked until the early 90s when all ships were sold as scrap metal.

During the River School trip I tried to see the Delta with clear eyes, beyond my previous perception in­ fluenced by at least two things. The first was my nostalgia connected with my childhood memories. Long surfaces of blue, demarcated from time to time by the green of float­ ing vegetation. The second is the

44

River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

social texture of the Delta. How the people of the Delta were trapped between new economic relations that instrumentalize nature and the bucolic image of the Delta as a diorama where people are just fixed pieces.

So, I tried to resist the spectacular views, and to see the mundanity of this place, but not from an exterior angle where is no place for empathy. I tried to imagine what kind of perception is necessary for that and if it is possible for somebody who lives in these times to be present in nature. Maybe this can happen only in a situation where you lose control and you don’t act according to your rules but instead those of the nature. One of these moments took place during our excursion, when our small group was without a guide in the boat, on the lake. We tried to come back to the shore, but my paddle lesson from childhood didn’t help too much. It was almost night. In the end, Reuben managed the situation and we came back safely. It wasn’t a very hazardous situation but it was a sense of danger which made nature more present with all its consequences. The only thing is that in a state of danger you cannot see the mundanity of nature, because you are focused on how to escape from this situation and to function under your own rules.

I’m interested in this tension between human and nature. To control versus to let it be. I hope I will explore this further in a future project.

MRF: Should frogs, fish and birds have a say in debates over the future of the Delta? What can we learn from the river?

VB: I think what is most important is to let the frog, the fish and the birds decide the future of Delta and we must intervene as little as possible. Maybe this attitude will change our concept of a future where we are just part of something bigger than us. We must apply stream ecology to our life.

MRF: As part of your artistic practice you date your works to the Mayan apo­ca­lypse of 2012: do you see parallels between the collapse of Mayan civilisation and the current sense of planetary crisis?

VB: In 2012 I began to gather news­ papers from all over the world that were published on 21st December 2012, the day that was predicted to be the last day before Mayan apoc­ alypse. This is the Last Archive, a context in which an artist or an artistic collective is invited every year to make a work in relation to the idea of the apocalypse. This action can be interpreted in many ways as a commemoration or a re­ enactment. For me, thinking about River School Excursion to Danube Delta, May 2014 the apocalypse over the two year

Vlad Basalici

45

Vlad Basalici, Largo, photo-performance, 2012, courtesy artist.

since the project started, it began to be a form of delaying the consumption of the final event. I believe we live in a time when news has a short cycle of public attention from the moment that something (in most cases a tragic event) becomes a headline until is replaced by another story with possible eschatological implications. This form of amnesia prevents us from seeing the long term consequences on the larger scale of the planet. We have become so accustomed to this state of permanent collapse that we only react to spectacular events, being unable to respond to this slow mov­ ing apocalypse, where everything slowly crumbles step by step. In fact the Mayan apocalypse didn’t happened in 2012 but long time before when the Spanish took the first step on the new continent and that was the end of this old civilisation. All the time, we are witnesses to micro-apocalypses. Booming Ben, the last ‪heath hen alive was seen on 11 March 1932. That was 18 years after the death of Martha, the only living passenger pigeon, the ultimate relic of the huge flocks of a billion pigeons that covered the sky of the United States fifty year before extinction, and the list goes on.

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Miruna Tîrcă

Urban survival strategies in the Bucharest Delta MRF: How did you first become involved with the Bucharest Delta?

MT: I was cycling for the first through the “delta” during one sunny September day, in

2013, with two friends. I did not know many things about this place, only that it was a vast empty and deserted spot not far away from the city centre. One of my friends had trouble with his bike, because of the rough terrain, dotted with broken glass and thorns; his bike tire burst, so he was not able to ride it anymore, just to walk next to it.

The other friend decided to keep him company, walking his bike too. I was disappoint­ ed because we had just started our exploration and I wanted to ride more. So I asked my friends if they could wait for me until I had made some more turns around. They agreed. I started to cycle by myself, found some little narrow paths hidden through the delta thicket and explored them with delight, until I was attacked by some dogs. I got pretty scared, but the next minute a man appeared, calmed the dogs and asking me what I was looking for. That was the moment when I came into contact with “Gica the fisherman” and his family composed of wife and about 12 kids. They were living in improvised tents, very well hidden in the bushes. I was shocked not by the precarious

Bucharest Delta, courtesy Miruna Tîrcă

Miruna Tîrcă

47

conditions they were living in, but simply by the fact that there were people inhabiting the delta, a fact which I had no idea about and did not expect. Sitting there and watch­ ing them, I suddenly had a feeling of going back in time through a wormhole, by about 200 hundred years, to an old peripheral Bucharest, where hundreds of gypsies were improvising their living on the former cesspools of the city.

MRF: What is special about the Bucharest Delta and how did it get its name?

MT: The place has been abandoned since 1989 and there are many opinions regard­

ing what the communist regime actually wanted to make out of it. Before 1989, there were people living there, cultivating flowers and vegetables. Their houses, along with a big monastery from the area, were demolished to make room for the new big proj­ ect, which was eventually suspended. The most common opinion is that the regime wanted to create an accumulation lake, part of a hydrologic system with the aim of protecting the city from flooding.

Anyway, the special thing about this location is the fact that left on its own and fa­ voured by the presence of numerous subterranean springs, the place was invaded by nature and an autonomous ecosystem was created; various independent explorers, but also acknowledged photographers from publications such as National Geographic, have documented the place, showing evidence of many bird species, fish, plants and even animals such as otters, foxes, weasels.

“Bucharest Delta” is actually an informal name that the lovers of the place are trying to promote, in order to introduce it into the collective conscience and the urban men­ tal maps of the citizens. Other people think it should not be considered a “delta” but rather a huge park or an “urban reservation”.

MRF: What can anthropologists learn from the precarious lifestyles of the inhabitants of the Delta?

MT: They can learn that urban survival strategies are endless and that things are not always what they seem to be. For example, this urban delta it’s not only about animals, birds, plants and huge walking paths, but also about socially excluded people who temporarily found shelter there, as I discovered by accident during a bike ride. Deserted places actu­ ally have their own life and their own inhabitants who, over time, win their right to live there – and we should respect this right or at least take it into consideration as a social dimension of the “delta issue”, when it comes to public debates about what the place should be like or what it should River School Excursion to Bucharest Delta, 9 May 2014 become.

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Bucharest Delta, courtesy Miruna Tîrcă

MRF: It was a really interesting experience going with the art crowd to the Delta and having the experience of a boat trip – we are very interested in experiential anthropology – why is it important to feel the environment, people and issues first hand?

MT: I think that anyone who is interested in anthropology should try to feel the en­ vironment, people and issues first hand, because that is all anthropology is about. It is not an “indoor” discipline, in my opinion. On the contrary, the whole outside world should be a huge classroom and anthropology should mediate between people and environments, teaching us all how to live together in better and better ways.

Miruna Tîrcă

49

Valyo

The river and the city Valyo is an independent organization of citizens of Budapest, who share an enthusi­ asm for the river Danube and want to make the city a better place to live. The name of our group Valyo originates from merging the Hungarian words for City (Város) and River (folyó).

Today the downtown of Budapest is separated from the river Danube by the traffic of the embankments on both sides. At Valyo, we try to find ways to reconnect the city with its greatest natural gem, the Danube. We believe that the river bank is a perfect loca­ tion for sports, cultural events and other leisure activities. We have organized events such as stone-skipping championship, petanque championship, a mobile sauna and a three-week long cultural festival at the riverbank, and designed several public-art ins­ tallations, which were part of the Danube Info trail.

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Valyo – The City and the River, Danube Budapest

We would like everyone to be able to make the most of the Danube. We would like the city to be associated with the river running through it. We would like the people living here to discover their own city and river, to realize that the river is a part of our environment. We would like the people of Budapest to mark the Danube on their mental map.

Plans have been brought forward before to rebuild the river bank, but they either disregarded the needs of people driving to work (by closing down the embankments completely), or found extremely expensive ways to solve these problems (such as di­ verting traffic of the embankments into underwater tunnels). We believe that we can get closer to our river without causing a conflict of interest between commuters and fu­ ture Danube-goers, and that we can accomplish this on a low-budget. The Valyo group is continuously discussing this topic with all stakeholders involved, such as the City Hall of Budapest, other NGO’s and architecture experts as well as international partners.

Valyo

51

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

53

2 54

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

Avian Ethnographies 55

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan

Urban wildlife

MRF: What first drew your attention to the presence of wildlife in urban environments?

ABAE: A blackbird nesting in the attic of the house where we lived. It reminded us of Kundera’s interpretation of history in connection with the blackbird’s invasion of the urban environment over the last centuries. In one of the first chapters of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” he says that “a change in the relationship of one species to another (fish, birds, plants, people) is more significant than a change in the relationship of a group within the same species. Globally, the fact that the blackbird goes against nature and follows man to his artificial anti-natural world produced a major change in the planetary order of things. It is beyond doubt more important than the Spaniards’ invasion of South America or the resettlement of Palestine by the Jews”. And yet no­ body dares to interpret the history of the last centuries as the blackbirds’ invasion of the human world.

MRF: In the series of drawings of birds nesting in unusual situations is there an element of comment on the destruction of natural habitats?

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Urban Wildlife, 2012-4

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

ABAE: It is rather a reference to the dimension of the human influence on the planet at large and a comment on how birds adapt to these new situations. Scientists argue that now we live in the Anthropocene era, when human activity has become the central driver of the planet’s geological changes. For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve.

At the moment there is an increasing tendency for birds to colonize cities. Statistics say that 60 to 70 percent of the overall wild populations are birds. Our research is centered on the synanthropization phenomena - the adaptation of wild populations to human-created (anthropogenic) conditions in general.

MRF: By following the story of birds’ adaptability to new situations, the question arises of the human ability to adapt and respond to the challenges of ecological crisis and climate change?

ABAE: Ecological crisis was produced by humans, who were too busy with their own existence to notice what major changes their actions produced on the environment.

The problem today is that ecology is intertwined with economic calculations and legal regulations. We believe the solutions to the ecological crisis must influence economic decisions, not vice versa. It’s interesting that the principles of economic life are based on a certain tendency in human nature – to accumulate things, to negotiate, barter, exchange one thing for another. Animals don’t do this, don’t need more than one shelter and basic things to survive. To rethink the nature of economics is the most important step.

MRF: There is an element of humour in the echoes between the news headlines and the images of nesting birds, is this a comment on the politics of the construction of the news or rather on the fact that these fragile species of

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Urban Wildlife, 2012-4

Anca Benera / Arnold Estefan

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birds exist below the radar of the media and in that way remain invisible in contemporary culture?

ABAE: Both the headlines and the images of birds are real facts, found in the media two apparently unrelated situations explained by their juxtaposition. We use deductive reasoning in the form of syllogisms.The humor is unintentional, but helps us under­ stand human behavior in a more critical way.

MRF: Could we consider these nesting sites as liberated zones of wilderness within the hyper-controlled city?

ABAE: Yes. There are also examples of spaces entirely reoccupied by nature, at a larger scale. For instance, in the south-eastern part of Bucharest, there is Văcărești delta, where nature has flourished in the absence of any human interference. It is a huge abandoned reservoir, supposed to be a part of the hydrological protection system, in case of flood.

The construction works started in 1986, during Ceausescu’s regime, when Vacaresti Monastery (historical monument) and the districts around it were demolished to make way for this huge basin. After 1989, the construction works stopped. This place occu­ pies today about 180 hectares, lying inside the built up area of Bucharest, between four major roads. The delta has water from twenty underground springs and in the twenty five years since the construction there stopped, many wild flora and fauna appeared on the site. Protected species of mam­ mals, rare birds, amphibians, in­ vertebrate, swans, ducks, snakes, foxes and beavers live together in this area. Apparently, this place is the biggest urban delta in Europe and has a chance to be declared a protected area, which would mean that nature has won a battle with humankind.

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Urban Wildlife, 2012-4

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MRF: You’ve spent some time upstream at the confluence of the Krems and Danube in Austria, what are your impressions, going against the flow, and from east to west, of the river as a barometer of nature and culture?

ABAE: From east to west, some discrepancies become obvious: downstream, the river is more like a tool for survival, with dark history

River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube

files (immigration line between Communist Romania and former Yugoslavia, smuggling during the embargo, the forced labor camps in the Danube-Black Sea Canal). Compar­ ing to this, the upstream part of the river Danube looks more as a leisure place, a tourist attraction. But more interestingly, the Danube is perceived also as a threat by the locals (the danger of floods). This threat, could be extended in its historical-metaphorical sense, considering the river’s path through the geography of fascism in Europe.

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Urban Wildlife, 2012-4

Anca Benera / Arnold Estefan

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Ex-Artists Collective (Tamás Kaszás / Anikó Loránt)

Unconscious environmentalism

MRF: Why is it important, from an environmental point of view, to build bird houses and place them in the trees?

Certain bird species do nest in natural tree cavities. Woodpeckers can make a hole for themselves, but they make a new hole every spring so other species (kind of) recycle these spaces. Because of the industrial-agro forestation there is much less old wood. Rotten and scooped out trees are not welcome at all in the human environment (such as in cities and around other settlements), often for safety reasons. This is why there are much fewer opportunities for many kinds of bird to brood. Placing birdhouses and feeder boxes around our garden or orchard is not only a help for the birds to re­ produce and survive the winter, but also has benefits for ourselves as well. More birds

TK:

Anikó Loránt, Bird Looking Back, 2013

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River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Histories on the Danube