Flood Embassy: Situated, Imaginative and Performative Learning through the River

Performing an imaginary institution, the Flood Embassy, children, young people and intergenerational groups imagine alternative futures and presents, 'through the river’.
This work derives from an ongoing project called RiVER -another look at the city, realised since 2024 across different geographies, groups, and approaches. This is a nature-centered, itinerant art observatory of urban transformations in constant collective creation of a multimodal glossary. 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 centre 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, in consequence, interrogates the spatiality and temporality of urban anthropology, particularly necessary in the light of rapid transformations of our cities.
The main dispositif is a collective glossary in construction, which is created and activated through imaginative and situated public space interventions, focusing on the participants’ local context and their own outreach, while embedded and reflecting global dynamics. River stories of individual and collective memory enter in dialogue with the creation of new narratives through imaginations. It experiments with different subjectivities and creates interpretations that don't separate nature and human beings on a conceptual level, enabled by the imagination that takes shape in a multimodal glossary, as it is ‘seen by the river’, through in situ interventions and hybrid surfaces and digital spaces, impersonating the river, with various age groups, along the riverside in multiple cities, complemented with dialogic encounters with artists, activists, researchers.
These experiments belong to the realm of critical and pluriverse pedagogies, intersecting with performative community art, therefore explore the urgency of situated, imaginative and performative pedagogies in a time when both our presence and imagination are deeply compromised, pointing towards the urgency of changing the micropolitics of being/together.