The Future of Water
Winding along the banks toward a place we can dream but not yet see
Here at the School for Living Futures, we’re embarking on a new journey this spring. I invite you to walk along the banks of the stream with us and see where it might lead. There will also be chances for you to wade into the flow.
The journey is called the Future of Water: a speculative art show. Krista, my sister and co-conspirator, and I developed the idea in conversations inspired by our relationships with Neuse Riverkeeper, Samantha Krop (who presented at a Living Futures Saturdays event back in November) and Justin Laidlaw, INDY journalist and author of By the Horns, a newsletter that reports on the activity of the Durham City Council. Krista had attended a number of the council meetings last year, witnessing the ongoing tensions between those trying to protect our waterways and non-human habitats, those trying to solve our housing shortage, and developers trying to… “develop.”
We wondered how bringing artists into this conversation might open up new possibilities and perspectives, and help us understand the problem—not with more information, since Sound Rivers already does an excellent job of collecting and organizing data around the health and illness of our rivers and streams, but with deeper knowing.
The “speculative” component to the project is an invitation to converse with the mystery of the future. Informed by our interest in solarpunk, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction, we wanted to invite artists to fully engage in imagining the beauty in possible futures for the issues facing our watershed. As Nneka Sobers writes of speculative art, “this form of radical imagination provokes a wider conversation and critical reflection on the future we are constructing. It is a mechanism that forces us to examine, process, and build past our societal trauma.”
Here is the description of the project we shared in the call for artists that went out last fall:
As Durham’s population swells, the city is under mounting pressure to create sustainable and affordable housing solutions. As urban and rural housing construction projects increase, they pose dangerous threats to our waterways: escalating erosion and flooding, wiping out critical habitats, and threatening our clean water sources. How do we create enough housing to meet the demands? How do we make sure housing is developed in equitable ways? Is our current system creating environmentally degraded silos and displacing low-income citizens into this marginal land? How can we ensure a livable future for everyone?
The Future of Water is a speculative art project commissioned by The School for Living Futures in partnership with the Durham Art Guild that will feature commissioned works by three Durham-based artists offering their visions and creative answers to these difficult questions. Speculative art helps us imagine and explore alternative futures that shift our thinking beyond the constraints of the present and allow us to consider new possibilities and approaches.
We were thrilled by the quality of applications we received from the call, and selected Durham-based artists Lucas Brown, Patrizia Ferreira, and James Keul for the exhibition. I will be sharing more here about each of them in the coming weeks so you can get to know their incredible work.
Part of the journey we’re embarking on with these artists involves monthly progress meetings, conversations with community members/experts, and an evolving research document where we can share resources and ideas. Last week was our first meeting, and it was a joy to begin to get to know these new friends. Their excitement and generosity are infectious, and we can’t wait to see what, and how, they make. We also started a conversation about ritual—what kind of water ritual we might co-create, and how we might invite you, our community, to participate.
So, walk (or swim) with us, if you will. The flow is clear in places, red with sediment pollution in others, so you cannot see how deep it goes. The banks wind through forests as well as neighborhoods, and humans are only one of many species that rely upon its waters.
I’ll sign off for now with Lucille Clifton’s poem, “the mississippi river empties into the gulf”:
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth, none of them emptying anything, all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow. it is the great circulation of the earth's body, like the blood of the gods, this river in which the past is the same water coming round. everyday someone is standing on the edge of this river, staring into time, whispering mistakenly: only here. only now.
Mark your calendars. The Future of Water will show at Durham Art Guild’s Golden Belt gallery May 11-28. You can also follow the project’s emergence this spring on Instagram @future.of.water.