Presentation short abstract

Sharing outputs and reflections from a place-responsive participatory arts inquiry emerging at the estuarial edge of the River Thames in Essex, England, mudlines are richly situated place-songs expressing the indeterminate encounters and intimate intra-actions of this precarious environment.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation shares outputs and reflections from a place-responsive participatory arts inquiry emerging at the estuarial edge of the River Thames in Essex, England. Estuaries are some of the most ecologically and culturally rich landscapes on earth; they are also some of the most threatened. Over 50% of the world’s estuaries have been directly altered by humans and all are at risk from climate change and sea level rise. In response to these times of estuarial erasure, mudlines pays attention to the shrinking edge of the wet-landscape around Canvey Island, surfacing local knowledges, practices, and stories through collaborative sound and intuitive singing.

The Thames Estuary, like many others, is excessively muddy. Vital to estuarine, oceanic and terrestrial ecologies and how they inter-connect, it is also fundamental to the way communities local to estuaries have developed and endure. Yet, neither culturally nor ecologically valued, it is this same mud that legitimises damage and neglect.

Neither wet-nor-land, this is a place of both-and-between where singular, linear space and time dissolve into emergent multiplicity; always-already in composition, albeit often tentatively, inconclusively, evolvingly. Inspired by Neimanis’ concept of ‘weather writing’ where our bodies become “sensitive interfaces with the weatherworld” to help “shift our understanding of human entanglements in climate change phenomena” (2014, 145), mudlines are richly situated place-songs that express the indeterminate encounters and intimate intra-actions that produce this precarious environment and, we hope, support the reshaping of relationships with it.