During my residency at VHDG I became increasingly curious about the Potmarge, a small wiggly river running through Leeuwarden. Unlike many urban canals, the Potmarge still retains fragments of its meandering form despite centuries of redirection, engineering and land reclamation. I became interested in it not as a landscape to represent, but as a body carrying multiple temporalities: the memory of the former Middelzee, the traces of contemporary ecological life, and the everyday rhythms of a city that often passes beside it unnoticed. At the same time, I was developing Schelde MAGIC / River Ghost, a participatory performance in the underground waterways of Antwerp. Both projects began asking similar questions.
IMAGE(IN) WATERS became a performance sketch through which I could begin testing these questions. I invited participants to become temporary researchers, listeners and storytellers. Together we travelled the Potmarge aboard two electricity powered "Green Joy" boats, treating the fleet as a floating field station.
The performance consisted of a series of simple scores designed to activate different ways of relating to the river. Participants listened with their eyes closed and temporarily became a documentation crew equipped with cameras, sound recorders and other sensing devices.
What emerged was a temporary ecology of attention. The river became something that could be tasted, imagined, documented, modelled and narrated through many different perspectives at once. The exercises revealed that listening to water is a choreography of observation, conversation, touch and speculation.
This performance marked an important moment in the ongoing development of the Rhizoaquatic Methodology. This sketch proposed a set of collective practices through which people and water could enter into relation. The methodology continues to evolve through site-specific performance scores, each responding to the histories, ecologies and social conditions of a particular body of water.
During my residency period at VHDG I met with Jurre, a local artist from Leeuwarden. Jurre had written a text about the former Middlezee in Friesland. I invited him to read it to the Potmarge and the meandering crew. Hereby an audio extract of that moment.
images made in collaboration with Can Demren
