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Presentation short abstract

This paper examines three water initiatives in the Rhenish Mining District through hydrofeminist figurations (monsters, cyborgs, water ghosts). I analyze how these groups challenge technocratic, extractive narratives through multiplying human-water relations and stories in post-mining landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

The Rhenish lignite mining district in Germany is undergoing fundamental transformation. Decades of open-pit mining produced massive hydrorelational interruptions. This paper presents three case studies of initiatives that challenge dominant technocratic water narratives and struggle to multiply water (futures) in post-mining landscapes.

The first examines the River Guardians of the Rhineland Water Plenum countering the normalization of infrastructural disruption. The second analyzes the initiative Save the Gillbach, fighting to preserve a stream whose source today only exists through cooling water. The third explores Walking with Water Ghosts, my curatorial-ethnographic project addressing (post-)mining water bodies as spectral entities that exceed spatiotemporal boundaries.

I propose reading these activities through three feminist figurations: monsters, cyborgs (Haraway 1985, 1991), and water ghosts. Through the monster, Rhineland waters become material-semiotic boundary figures and companions to inhabit damaged hydrorelational environments. The Gillbach emerges as a cyborgian stream, a techno-natural hybrid whose infrastructural dependencies expose ambivalent entanglements of water and energy regimes. Walking with Water Ghosts deploys a hydrofeminist hauntology to reveal spatiotemporal ruptures, linking the future Hambach Lake to water territories in Colombia, criticizing green colonialism while insisting on planetary water justice.

Methodologically, my empirical work draws on Composite Curating, combining curating (Bismarck 2021), collective ethnography (Hetherington 2025), walking-with (Springgay & Truman 2018), and hydrofeminist phenomenology (Neimanis 2017). By engaging with these waters through feminist figurations while walking-with water I want to discuss how such transdiciplinary, curatorial “knowledge exchange events” (Harrison 2015) produce “third stories” (Sørensen/Laser 2021) cultivating attention for troubled waters in the Rhenish district.

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A discussion between an artist and a PhD student on the rise of the River Regeneration Movement Inspired by Beavers (RRMB) in France, focusing on multi-species alliances around rivers and the role of art in making alternative visions visible.

Presentation long abstract

Confronted with accelerating environmental degradation and recurrent droughts, new movements are emerging that seek to make alternative river imaginaries and practices visible (Boelens & al., 2023). In this context, we analyse the rise of the River Regeneration Movement inspired by Beavers (RRMB), a heterogeneous assemblage of citizens, environmentalists, artists, farmers, beavers, and river professionals. Our contribution brings together the perspectives of the artist Suzanne Husky who initiated and helped spark this movement (Husky & Morizot, 2024)—by importing practices from the western United States (Jordan &Faifax, 2022)—and a PhD researcher in geography Samuel Pinjon who studies the transformative effects of such initiatives on water policies.

Our presentation examines how the RRMB has activated an imaginary around what is a "alive river", challenging dominant river-management paradigms by proposing a dynamic and relational understanding of rivers and lands. We first explore the epistemic dimension of the movement, focusing on the circulation of scientific knowledge from the United States to France and the renewed attention to empirical and experiential ways of “reading” rivers. We then discuss the role of artistic practices as both representation tools for thinking rivers differently and as vectors for experimenting with alternative restoration techniques. The presentation also addresses the strategies adopted when engaging with river professionals, highlighting the controversies and frictions that arise from these encounters. The place and role of beavers, what the RRMB learns from them and to what extent drawing inspiration from their expertise is a matter of multi-species justice (Houart, 2024).

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Understanding rivers as living beings and multispecies communities encourages us to analyse political processes for their defence from a multispecies justice perspective. This presentation does so through the stories of the Piatúa River in Ecuador and the Maas River in the Netherlands.

Presentation long abstract

What subjects do we acknowledge and whose voices do we listen to in political practices and decision-making processes for river defence around the world? Departing from an understanding of rivers as living entities and multispecies communities, I propose looking at processes for river defence from a multispecies justice perspective, one that is attentive to the subjecthood, agency, needs, and interests of human and other-than-human beings in river territories. In particular, an important question is: how are non-human beings (e.g., rivers themselves, animals, plants) included, represented, or excluded and misrepresented in political processes around rivers, for instance, in response to extractivism or restoration projects? I argue that, in order to pursue or attain some form of MSJ in these processes, people need to integrate embodied, affective, and creative methodologies, practices, and epistemologies, in order to better attune and respond to more-than-human communities in rivers. I demonstrate this by sharing examples from two case studies: the movement in defence of the Piatúa River in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, led by local Kichwa river defenders; and the artistic project Maas Lab in the southern Netherlands, which engages with the Maas River as a living subject and partner in the process of artistic (co)creation. These movements and experiments reimagine and reconfigure both hydrosocial territories and relationships between human beings, rivers, and their multispecies communities.

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We offer findings from Watershed Moments, a project to bring the River Don’s emerging digital identities into conversation with the embodied experiences of humans. We explore how experimental, cyborg forms of mediation created by the River Dôn Project generate connection, affect, and alienation.

Presentation long abstract

The River Don flows 110km across South Yorkshire, UK. For centuries it has been exploited and controlled by humans, including a major rerouting in the 1620s. Mining and metal works discharged waste to such a degree that the river contained no fish from the late 19th century until the 1980s. Abandoned mines continue to leach toxins, while in 2024 there were 1,829 instances of sewage dumping covering 40 sites. Yet, the river has enacted its own agency. Major flooding events in 2007 and 2019 have unsettled its relationship with neighbouring communities. Salmon have begun to spawn again. The River Don and its human communities are deeply entangled, co-creating landscapes and ecologies.

Since 2022 the River Dôn Project has explored whether a river has rights, and the systems required to achieve this, building experimental digital platforms to encourage stewardship. This includes a community-owned digital twin, aiming to hold stakeholders to account, and a storytelling chatbot that converts river data into powerful narratives. We offer findings from the Watershed Moments project that bring the river’s emerging digital identities (from sewage to stewardship) into conversation with the embodied experiences of humans. The project explores how the RDP’s digital platforms generate cyborg forms of mediation between humans and nonhumans. We examine how these generate forms of connection, affective experiences and opportunities for political mobilisation, or potentially alienate people from the lively-ness of the river. The presentation features creative research methods, including reflexive river walks, demonstrating how research can both critique and affirm river movements.

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We immerse into experiences of river swimmers and explore embodied entanglements between human and ecological wellbeing. We weave together stories from Rivers Thames, Derwent & Wharfe, exploring the implications of swimming for swimmers’ wellbeing and the watery worlds they immerse themselves in.

Presentation long abstract

We discuss ongoing projects that immerse into the experiences of river swimmers and explore embodied entanglements between human and ecological wellbeing. We weave together stories from the Rivers Thames, Derwent and Wharfe, gathered through multi-sensory, place-based methodologies such as swim-along and riverbank interviews. In so doing, we respond to geographer Hannah Pitt’s (2018) call to consider a ‘wider palette of water experiences’, centring watery spaces that are often not glitteringly blue, but earthy green, rusty red and cloudy brown. Indeed, these rivers are always murky, contradictory in their ability to draw human and more-than-human beings into relations where both wellbeing and sickness ebb and flow. The growth in outdoor swimming in the UK has been matched by growing threats to the nation’s rivers. Reports continually tell us of the fragile state of the nation’s freshwater ecosystems, suffocated by agricultural run-off, sickened by sewage, and contaminated with forever chemicals. Outdoor swimming can therefore be both restorative and healing, polluted and risky. We delve into this paradox, asking whether the relations that emerge through outdoor swimming are rejuvenating and if so, for whom? Through investigating these riverine relations, we can critically examine the potential of the practice to shift human perspectives of multispecies watery worlds. As Rebecca Olive (2022) powerfully captures, ‘Swimming is not conceptual or metaphorical – it is a set of relations to ourselves and to what else is there.’ We centre these relations, exploring their implications for the wellbeing of swimmers and the watery worlds they immerse themselves in.

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Presentation short abstract

DRINK THE RIVER is a video game and expanded animation, offering a critical (re)imagination of the River Eden in Cumbria, northern England. Through moving between the worlds of river and human body in the game, porosity between watery bodies is emphasized and human-river-sewage-cycle explored.

Presentation long abstract

DRINK THE RIVER is a collaboration between artist and researcher Rosa Prosser, and animation artist and programmer Christopher Bonk.

Due to sewage pollution into the River Eden (the Eden is in the top 20 most polluted rivers in the UK) and land ownership difficulties, access to and into the river is contested. Responding to these difficulties of directly entering the river, we developed a video game titled "Drink the River", building the world of the river into game format, to reimagine our access and immersion.

Through the world building of the game, we explored direct and indirect relations between the river and ourselves - the game moves between the river and the human body, allowing for a very literal exploration of our intra-actions with the river, reminding the player that we are in fact bodies of water. We are now working on a project in VR, taking the idea of gaming and world building to explore the entanglements of history, industry, people, and ecology in the River Emscher, Germany.

The form of a game gives playful exploration of these issues - allowing for all ages to engage and opening access beyond those directly in contact with the river. The space of the game also allows for (re)imaginations, something we are especially interested in - how can thinking through and with the river in a different form, open conversations for how we can redraw boundaries, definitions, and (re)imagine (playful) possible futures.