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Presentation short abstract

In this presentation, I engage with the visible and less visible traces of mud in the public, private and ecological domains to study the impact of the floods that hit Belgium and the Netherlands in July 2021.

Presentation long abstract

In this presentation, I engage with the visible and less visible traces of mud in the public, private and ecological domains to study the impact of the floods that hit Belgium and the Netherlands in July 2021. I think with mud as a substance that stays behind after a flood and investigate how mud 'intra-acts' with the outside world. Mud is considered here a substance that impacts (human) life and vice versa (Cohn & Lynch, 2017). This smelly, sticky substance, often discarded as waste, ‘animates’ life in important ways (Chen, 2012). Through the manifold ways mud is entangled with the outside world, I show how its ongoing presence reshapes landscapes and transforms relationships between people and their (material) environment over time, pointing out how disasters have no clear endpoint (Fox, 2024; Abbott, 2016), but rather are 'materializing from the intra-actions of always emergent things-in-phenomena' (Neimanis & Walker, 2014b: 560).