Rivers and Power: A Conversation on the Imaginaries, Materiality, and Culture of Urban Waters
Thursday, October 17, 2024, 6:00pm
Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 E. 57th St.
Dilip da Cunha (Columbia University)
Rachel Havrelock (University of Illinois Chicago)
Becky Lyons (Friends of the Chicago River), Welcome Remarks
Jennifer Scappettone (The University of Chicago), Introduction
Aaron Jakes (The University of Chicago), Moderator
The relationship of water to power has taken shape across plural scales of space and time, governing how cities and their extensions as “landscape” have been designed, constructed, represented, and operated over the millennia. These keynotes will open up a dialogue surrounding the dynamic of water and power; they will serve to open a binational symposium addressing challenges facing urban watersheds across the globe in a time of climate change and the diminishing effectiveness of regulatory apparatuses—when urban riversheds, long treated as waste sinks and logistics systems, are being sporadically reclaimed for wildlife and recreation, but also as scenographic instruments of gentrification and narrative control. The conversation between da Cunha and Havrelock will foreground the role of wetness as a vital agent within urbanized territory, challenging the production of the “river” as an ideological instrument, and the extractivist and colonial perspective that has governed the manipulation of water in the modern age.
This event will provide the philosophical and thematic grounding for “floating” practice-based workshops to be held the next day on the Chicago River.
Floating Workshop on the Chicago River
Friday, October 18, 2024, 11:00am (rain date: October 19)
North Shore Marine, 1438 W. Cortland St.
(event ends at Chicago Maritime Museum, 1200 W. 35th St.)
Austin Happel (Research Biologist, Shedd Aquarium)
Rachel Havrelock (Professor and Director, Freshwater Labs at the University of Illinois at Chicago)
Norman Long (Sound Artist, Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology)
Lize Mogel (Independent Interdisciplinary Artist/Counter-Cartographer)
Phil Nicodemus (Research Director, Urban Rivers)
Rebecca Snedeker (Independent Artist/Filmmaker and Public Scholar)
julie ezelle patton (independent artist, performer, and permaculturist)
This floating workshop will take place on a boat ride along the Chicago River from North Shore Marine LLC in Bucktown on the North Branch to the Damen Silos, disembarking at Park 571, and moving to the Chicago Maritime Museum. The workshop will convene 40 scholars, students, and community members, including artists, writers, activists, and designers, to engage in cross-disciplinary creative practice. Three practicing artists heavily involved in challenges facing urban watersheds will be paired with experts on the Chicago watershed to offer workshops on the boat.
We wish to tap and expand participant perspectives surrounding this waterway via creative prompts delivered while we are on the water, opening up a comparative imaginary through analogies with other urban watersheds.
What’s special about this event is that the audience is really a full participant; it will be composed of specialists and students from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives, traveling together, following creative prompts and sharing knowledge. We have imagined this counter-cruise as a pedagogical opportunity to elicit and discuss creative artifacts hailing from water experts who might not consider themselves artists at all, and to demonstrate that art can offer up genuinely new thinking surrounding urban watersheds.
After the “floating” component is over, we will move to the Chicago Maritime Museum to discuss shared findings and artifacts of documentation, opening onto a discussion of how participant work might shed further light on the history and future of development and its collateral damage along the river. This will be followed by a reception and an invitation to explore the museum on one’s own.
Co-sponsored by CEGU, the International Institute of Research in Paris, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, CNRS/IRL HumanitiesPlus, and the Department of English.