Imagine you are the river…

The itinerant project Ri/VER: another look at the city, is a nature-centered observatory of urban transformations. Ri/VER refers to the river but also stands for re-ver, revise, meaning look at it again, see from a different angle. The central idea of the project is that thinking ‘through’ the river shifts the anthropocentric and short-term focused understandings of our urban context and its conflicts. The project works with the proposition that by making the river the center of our thinking, we can move stagnant conversations and understand the conflictive transformations that occur in and around our cities locally and globally. The project responds to an urgent need to look for a lens that interrogates the current spatiality and temporality of urban anthropology. This is particularly necessary in the light of rapid transformations of our cities intertwined with a complex global landscape of capitalism, technofeudalism (Varoufakis, 2024), and climate change. This article proposes a thought experiment based on the learnings of the project so far, along with the following questions: How does our analysis of the emotional, political, economic, and social landscapes of a city change if we put the river in the center of them? What can we learn if we zoom out and look at the city through the temporality of the river? How do we understand the social life of the rivers, if we take a different viewpoint, the river itself? But more importantly, how do we understand the basic concepts that guide our work within Anthropology, looking at them from this angle?

Thinking about the city through the river

There is an intricate relationship between cities and rivers. The role of rivers in the development of urban settlements is undeniable, as is the problematic relationship throughout history between rivers and cities: regulating, exploiting, and transforming them. The book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity? (Graeber and Wengrow, D., 2021) contests the idea that civilizations emerged solely from the regulation of rivers for agricultural purposes. For instance, indigenous communities that coexisted with rivers built rather on a nurturing relationship with the environment, instead of regulation.

Urban anthropology has long been concerned about rivers and their social lives. There is also an increasing interest in anthropology towards rethinking the relationship with nature, including the rivers. The cultural significance of rivers is indeed an incredibly fruitful topic through which we can look at for instance at colonisation, but also pollution. The idea of rivers as subjects of anthropological research can take different departing points: “If one begins with the premise that rivers are fundamentally social in nature, then it is possible to treat rivers as the ‘subject’ rather than the ‘object’ of investigation.” (Wagner and Jacka, 2018) This idea, however, is not the same as animism.

There are many examples, including legal approaches that treat rivers as living beings.  However, the Indigenous approach, which goes beyond the rights of nature framework, emphasising the inseparability of humans from the natural world. Indeed, the Maya Tojalobal language lacks objects, the dialogue is always between subjects. Another important connection to the indigenous perspective is that history is not seen as strictly moving forward or backward, but as something that exists in the present moment, where past and future are interconnected. (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010, p. 54. ) This cyclical and spiral view of time greatly aligns with the river’s temporality.

There is a growing attention towards the indigenous approach to rivers, a good example is the documentary I am the River, the River is me (directed by Petr Lom) in which Māori tribal leader Ned Tapa takes a group of people on trip down the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the first river in the world recognized as a legal person. 

Astrida Neimanis’s important work on Watery reminds us all of being bodies of water and invites us to understand we are all part of a fluid circulation. (Neimanis, 2012) This view can radically change our thinking regarding our social and political concepts, as well as question what we might think about identities or boundaries, for example.

This project indeed walks on the line of dissolving those boundaries, in different ways. The first step in this process of rethinking is an appeal to imagine we are the river. The aim is to look at the urban environment from a radically different point of view. Changing the anthropocentric view, not only empathizes with the river, but our understanding enters a completely different spatial and temporal dimension. The project applies this simple yet revealing exercise to enter into a wider reflection on how we perceive ourselves and our relation to nature. In the long term, however, works on not simply switching points of view, but breaking out of the limits of many languages, experimenting with different subjectivities, and creating interpretations that do not separate nature and humans on a conceptual level.

Imaginative and collaborative approach

The described conceptual frame is both a base for multimodal ethnographic research, as well as for a curatorial and artistic concept in its wide sense. The persons who participate in the creative dialogues and workshops, impersonate the river to learn, understand, and imagine possible presents and futures and understand the transformations of the city course from a radically different angle. They are asked to share their experiences about the river(s), from different points of view and through a variety of activities: dialogues, art-based workshops, walks, and more, and also to transform themselves into the river in their imagination. As Culhane argues, imagination plays a crucial role in ethnographic work. Ethnography in this more imaginative interpretation can go way beyond observation and collection of data,  and use imaginative and creative approaches to engage with different subjects. (Culhane, 2017) In this sense, in this project, knowledge production happens through creative processes that mobilize a series of expression forms through the activation of imagination. The radical imagination is a concept that gained a great popularity in the last few years. If we understand radical imagination as the ability to envision a world and society different from its current state, acting upon this vision in the present, inspiring action (Khasnabish, Haiven, 2014.), then anthropology, and in the case of our topic, urban anthropology holds the potential to become a vehicle of change, by not only increasing the attention to nature but also by changing the way it produces knowledge on this subject. If we base our thinking on the inseparability of humans and the natural world, the act of creating spaces of research through more imaginative methods, that allow us to break through linguistic and conceptual barriers, becomes also a matter of hermeneutical justice (Fricker, 2007), by creating the possibility to think along different categories.

Collage by Dayana

In spring 2024, the project started with workshops mostly with children who attend the Bairro Horizonte Residents’ Association’s afternoon activities,  a neighborhood close to the center of Lisbon, yet facing several layers of exclusion, being an ex-SAAL territory. The project since then has worked with different age groups, and recently integrated activities with artists and cultural professionals. The creations of the project currently include a series of photos, sound recordings, and drawings being collected on a digital platform. The other main ‘container’ of the creative process is a glossary.  This ‘beyond textual’ glossary builds on words and images that emerged during the workshops, including the ones held in partnership with the Bairro Horizonte Residents’ Association, like the Sounds of Tejo workshops and the meeting with the Liquid Becomings (European Pavilion 2024) Tagus crew, a group of artists who took a journey on the Tagus river. It also incorporates ideas and imaginations of artists, urban researchers, and ‘inhabitants’ of various kinds. This project has taken only its first steps so far and aims to become a long-term, itinerant one. The current article indeed is an opportunity to reframe the practical experiences of the project in the frames of anthropology, which in turn will be brought back to the future workshops. This dialogue is particularly important in order to question extractivist approaches in research but also in art.

Towards a different glossary of Sustainability

This article proposes the exercise to rethink some concepts of anthropology and of the AnthroART project, based on the conceptual frame proposed by the Ri-VER project, which as described, goes way beyond a thinking exercise and proposes a different way of relation through art-based practice, inspired by words and sentences shared during the walks, art-based workshops or the other digital/face-to-face dialogues, unfolding them into this proposed speculative narrative.

What if our social self could be the river, stepping out of our perception as humans, and city inhabitants and could look at our habitat as it might be seen by the river? The idea of being limited ‘as a body’ and crossed over (by ships for example), is a recurrent one among the imaginations evoked by this exercise, as is the desire to overflow the riverbanks. At the same time, the feeling of spaciousness, peace, calm, and the ability to breathe are also present.  The city itself is often not seen as something separate, it is rather something that permeates, it does so through its joy, but also through its aggressivity.

Could such a point of view change our thinking about social self? If our concept of ‘human’ is inseparable from the river and nature, what does ‘environment’ exactly mean to us? If we are one with nature, the environment, indeed, is us. Definitions of sustainability greatly vary, but the one in the Cambridge Dictionary I find very revealing regarding our thought experiment: “causing, or made in a way that causes, little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time” What if we were one with the river and the question would rather be about causing or not harm to ourselves? What would be our take on sustainability? Can we think about contemporary conflicts in our cities, related to migration, touristification, gentrification, or the consequences of climate change by seeing them as potential harms to ourselves, rather than to nature?

Special thanks to Abhijot, Yuvrat, Noordeep, Renato, Naman, Leonor, Carolina, Maelys, as well as Dayana, Lana, Theodora, Aline, Diego, Kevin, to Ilhame, the mediator Bruna Vaz and coordinator Andressa Campos of the Bairro Horizonte Residents’ Association for supporting to take the first steps in this endeavour. Many thanks to Alice Angelozzi de Oliveira, Marta Angelozzi. 

The initiative ‘periferias dibujadas’ is an ‘improbable international observatory’ of urban transformations and conflicts, as well as a space to document and reflect on ways of creating spaces for and with children or in intergenerational groups to research, narrate, and intervene in their urban context through art.supporting to take the first steps in this endeavour. Many thanks to Alice Angelozzi de Oliveira, Marta Angelozzi. Imagine you are the river…

1. SAAL(Local Ambulatory Support Service) was a unique housing initiative born after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, where architects and city residents worked together to create affordable homes in response to widespread squatting.

2. https://padlet.com/periferiasdibujadas/ri_ver 

3.  This encounter was possible thanks to the work  of Olga Uzikaeva and Laura Kalauz. 

4.  Generously contributed to the first experimental dialogues with their inspiring thoughts:  Ana Estevens, Elena Castilla, Gloria Ríos and Nicolás Roldán. 

5. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sustainable