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Paper short abstract

This paper examines forms of “telling the river” after the 2022 Oder disaster among people closely connected to it—artists, residents, photographers, and biologists. It frames attunement and eco-elegy as affective ways of living with a damaged river and caring for its future.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, the Oder and its valleys have come to appear as anthropogenic landscapes marked by degradation, uncertainty, and the specter of future catastrophes. Images of dead fish, foul-smelling sludge, and a pervasive silence momentarily made the river hyper-visible. Yet after the media spectacle subsided, the consequences of ecological violence—anger, grief, and broken relationships—remained a daily experience for residents along the Oder’s banks. Rather than a passive backdrop to human action, the river has become a contested and fragile relation shaped through entanglements of ecological processes, political neglect, regulatory failure, and situated practices of care.

This paper analyzes visual, sonic, and narrative practices that have emerged around the Oder as affective responses to the “slow violence” of environmental degradation and as modes of living with a damaged river. Drawing on short-term sensory ethnography conducted with people living with, on, and near the Oder River, I introduce attunement as a category linking affect, embodied perception, and an ethics of care. Walking muddy riverbanks, drifting with the current, listening, recording sounds, and creating photographic archives generate time-extended forms of attention through which humans and the river are co-attuned, sustaining relations beyond the moment of spectacular disaster.

I describe these practices as eco-elegies: not nostalgic laments for a “lost nature,” but affective narratives that remain with fragility, uncertainty, and responsibility over time. As forms of river storytelling, they are oriented toward possible futures rather than merely recording loss, and they aim to provoke political and ethical responsibility.