Re-membering a river (2024)
On a cold day in January 2024, we set out on an audiowalk. Many hands carried small bowls of water, and together we brought a buried body of water back into motion. While we walked, we listened to a story about how we could relate to the landscape differently: not the story of asserting our dominance over the landscape, but one of symbiosis and co-creation.
De Zuiderwaterlinie commissioned me to make an audiowalk to close the first chapter of their project Menno's Reis. It retraces and retells the journey of fortress-builder Menno van Coehoorn. His journey 325 years ago led to the oldest and longest water defense line in the Netherlands. The project Menno's Reis asks what that heritage can mean today, in a time of water shortages and floods.
The story of the Zuiderwaterlinie is about more than the future of old Dutch fortifications. It is also the story of how the Dutch relate to the landscape. We seem to be leaving behind the long-running myth that we humans can shape the land to our will without ever suffering the consequences. That myth is ever-present in the history of the Zuiderwaterlinie. Bergen op Zoom carries it too. Beneath the city runs the Grebbe. A man-made body of water. As the city grew, people began to build over it until, eventually, the water vanished from sight. It lost the connection to the water that once fed it, and to this day, the path of the Grebbe still exists underground. Fascinated by this, I set out to make an audiowalk about it.
For a long time we have treated the landscape as something that had to be tamed. Now, we are paying the price for that with floods and droughts.
Early in the morning I collected river water from nearby. I poured it into small bowls, which were handed to a group of participants. Carrying these bowls and silent-disco headphones, we followed the buried path of the Grebbe above ground, from the Markiezenhof toward the Ravelijn. Along the way we listened to a story about rivers and the collective ecosystems that make up landscapes and beings, and about author Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea that all flourishing is mutual: one's flourishing depends on the flourishing of others. Wooden needles by Tijs Rooijakkers marked the route, stitching the fragments of the landscape back together. At the Ravelijn we gathered on a floating bridge. There we poured our water together into the Pielekenswater around the Ravelijn, as our human bodies of water, the Grebbe, and the river were brought into contact once again.
Read more about it at the Zuiderwaterlinie and the Geschiedkundige Kring Bergen op Zoom.
Can we move through the landscape with needle and thread, re-member the river, and stitch the fragmented bodies of water back together again?
