Last month, Sam was fortunate to attend the ‘Voices of Water’ workshop held at Tate Modern on the banks of the River Thames. This event brought together artists, scientists and river guardians to share their stories which took us on a journey across bodies of water from around the world. It’s intention was to speak to the trans nationality of water – it’s interconnectedness – and how artists can work with international movements like Rights of Nature to support ‘all living beings in constellation with each other’. Sussex river guardians ‘Love our Ouse’ were there along with artists Carolina Caycedo and Emma Critchley and scientist Anne Robinson from Roehampton University.
This event was organised by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary & Academy and Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor. It follows on from the workshop Voices of the River: Weaving Connections with the Ouse with Love our Ouse in May 2025.
It was a beautiful sunny day in London as artists, scientists and river guardians gathered to share their stories which took us on a journey across bodies of water from around the world. Their intention was to speak to the transnationality of water – it’s interconnectedness – and how artists can work with international movements like Rights of Nature to support ‘all living beings in constellation with each other’. Sussex river guardians ‘Love our Ouse’ were there along with artists Carolina Caycedo and Emma Critchley and scientist Anne Robinson from Roehampton University.
Emma Critchley shared film clips that support her ‘Soundings’ installation raising the potential of the Rights of the Deep Sea as a means of protecting this un-boundaried oceanic commons from deep sea mining. Anne Robertson brought an impassioned scientific voice in her study of river invertebrates and the significance of the permeable boundary between ground water and river bed.
Carolina Caycedo, brought her concertina book the River Serpent (2017) that investigates how manmade infrastructures such as dams affect bodies of water as well as the surrounding body of people. As she spoke the book unfolded and meandered through the audience who were invited to read and respond to a page they connected with. Then, Love our Ouse founders Natasha and Matthew – who brought with them a representative of the Ouse herself (in a glass) – shared their river poem and their story so far and how they won support from Lewes District Council for a Charter of Rights of the River Ouse.
What is the relationship between the right to ‘be’ and the places of such beings?
I came away with so many impressions: the power of song and poetry to tell stories, the power of citizen science to support data and the richness of information when an interdisciplinary approach is taken. I was also moved to reflect on the contradictions of oneness and boundaries – of the fluidity, and ever changing quality of natural boundaries versus the hard-edged, uncompromising boundaries constructed by humans (political and material).
What is the relationship between the right to ‘be’ and the places of such beings? Nature’s rights have never been questioned in those places where indigenous and first nations peoples still live in reciprocal harmonious relationship with Earth as a living system, where, at most, humans hold themselves in a custodian role. But where modernity’s global power-over dynamics reside, nature remains commodified, enslaved, her rights eroded and lost in the story of separation.
Moreover, in this ongoing story of separation and polarised divisions, we continuously fail to uphold the human rights (still prioritised in anthropocentric culture). It takes courage, hope and determination to believe that we can develop the capabilities needed to undertake the huge task of upholding the rights of the whole multiplicity of life so desperately in need of protection? And whilst the right of nature movement may not be perfect (perpetuating still the separation between humans and nature), Carolina Caycedo suggests that it might be bridge needed to take us to the paradigm we dream for.
Most strongly, I was left with the deepest conviction of the power of collaboration between art and science as alchemy for active hope and catalysing the shift towards a safe and just future. The evidence of science – no matter how compelling – has yet to change the trajectory of planetary overshoot. Science alone will not succeed in changing minds, it is the artists and the storytellers who have the power to translate and transform the knowledge in ways that speak not just to our minds but also to our hearts and souls.
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