Research Study #1: Coming into contact with a river you cannot touch

Opening touchpoint 

The River Brent is a watery body running through the London boroughs of Brent, Ealing and Barnet, where I live. The etymology of ‘Brent’ is ‘holy one’ and yet this sacred body has been systemically defiled by sewage misconnections and chemical run off, caught in a bureaucratic soup of ir/responsibilities between The Environment Agency, local government, businesses and absent property developers. And yet, this counter-current through the city is tended and defended by the volunteer grassroots group Clean Up The River Brent who gift  tremendous labour and take on considerable risk coming into contact with dangerous pollutants.  I wanted to touch the river, work hand-in-the-water to see what impressions or marks it would make on paper but I couldn’t. The water is too toxic and risks contamination. In the process of art-making, a provocation emerged: how can you come in contact with a river that cannot be touched? And what politics emerges from those who are or are not touching it? 

I decided to investigate this provocation through a series of material studies and tactile processes, particularly forms of ‘contact printing’ as a way of making contact with the river and eliciting insights. I am creating a series of storytelling objects like containers of water projected hands that can’t make physical contact; direct-to-film experimental animation; chemigrams made with the types of cleaning materials polluting the river.  Where statistics and headlines fail to mobilise action, perhaps these beautifully- mournful objects might move people differently?

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Research discovery

I wanted to collect some water. I could not do this unaided and needed to be accompanied by someone who could identify clean-enough water to avoid illness or contamination caused by sewage. Daniella Levene of Clean Up The River Brent kindly assisted me. She has developed a deep sensitivity to the river as a long time friend of the water and a relentless campaigner. The risk and labour involved in taking care of this river is astonishing and reflects the stark difference between those who manage and those who steward England’s Green and Pleasant Land Blue and Unpleasant Water. The advent of David Cameron’s Big Society alongside austerity (Natural England receives ⅓ of the budget it did in 2008) shifted responsibility onto the ‘community’. The work of taking care of nature which should fall under the state is now reliant on unpaid labour whilst those in power seldom have their hands in the water. This resonates with recent scholarship on who is cleaning and caring from Françoise Vergès Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism; The Wellcome Collections recent Hard Graft exhibition and in the context of polluted waters Mel Y Chen’s Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections and Ravi Agarwal’s Alien Waters. 

I am interested in what ‘data’ the water and its contaminants might produce of itself so I experiment with making-contact printing. Inspired by a soil chromatography workshop taken with Goldsmiths’ Forensic Architecture team, I try making ‘watergrams’ (photograms) pouring different water samples onto photo-sensitive paper. I am unsure what they mean yet but the water feels like it is impressing itself. Other handmade image processes produce other similarly ambiguous results. I add materials to a film reel and run it through the projector, I pour water onto a projector as a kind of collaborative performance. There is something that emerges in the ‘poetic gesture’ and I reference Dominique White’s fabrics fed to the sea or Penny Boxall’s decomposing poems.   

Within this process a mourning emerges. England’s waters are too polluted to swim, saturated with forever chemicals and more often than not, illegal to come into touch with. England is one of the only countries in the world with a privatised water system. Projections of my hands on containers of water feel deeply sad. I wonder what would emerge if I invited people from Thames Water or The Environment Agency to engage in these practices with me that sit somewhere in between a creative dialogue and a ritual. How would they be stirred differently? What kind of relationality would emerge if they were to come into contact? As Rae Johnson writes of embodied social justice in The Poetic Body Politic: Embodied Art Making as Activism, “politics is embedded in everyday experiences and enacted through embodied relationships with others. The body is a site of political intervention.” I also think of Erin Brokovich or Obama’s invitation to sip on Flint water - things hit different when you have to come into contact with the nature you are (or are not) taking care of.

Implications  / inquiries to develop

• The politics of who is actually in contact with nature - through volunteer labour, grassroots community groups. The different qualities and conditions of stewardship - unpaid labour is different to service, calling in bell hooks’, How Can We Serve?)

• Practices and opportunities to bridge the distance between those in power and the sites in question- methods to bring them closer into contact