SRC Workshops | Science and Art

Introduction to Science and Art and Online Workshops | Ecopolitical Mapping and River Anthology | Tuesday September 15th, 2pm – 5pm CET | Zoom

We gather for a short introduction in which we learn about the basic tools of ethnography, including some examples of projects that use this lens to look at rivers. You can then join one of our workshops where you will participate in the creation of an ecopolitical map of Europe or a river zine (small magazine).

Ecopolitical Mapping: In this workshop, you will take part in a participatory collective mapping approach, that will lead into an illustrative, ecopolitical map of Europe. You will engage in a series of questions, through which the participants common eco-political knowledge of Europe will be translated into a series of maps. The questions will be separated into three domains: biodiversity, geography, and human impact.

This workshop will be one of many held around Europe, through physical and virtual meetings. After each workshop, the project team will systematize the information collected during the mapping session and transcribe the data collected through a multi-species perspective. The mission is to visually translate the existing rich biodiversity and natural complexity of Europe, into something tangible, educational, and excitingly engaged with.

Take a look at this story map, to learn more about the project’s motivations, methodologies, and to follow it’s ongoing process!

River Anthology: In this workshop, we invite curious minds to engage in creating a subjective anthology of your own river territories, which will be stitched together into an interactive website // zine.

Imagine a collectively composed virtual stream, which runs from north to south and east to west connecting different cultural ecosystems and subjective landscapes with each other. By scrolling down its meandering course and hovering over its constantly morphing terrains, curious travelers can listen to the stories it has to tell and thereby explore the respective cultural environments grown on and nourished by the fertile soil the river has offered to the world. It doesn’t matter if you want to explore creative methods for the first time or if you are an experienced artist, as long as you feel a connection to rivers in some way.

Before the workshop, we simply ask each participant to collect 5 -10 pieces of media related to their respective river territories. Those pieces can span from personal encounters with the river to cultural artifacts. We suggest collecting: poems, songs, photographs, your own short stories, fables, mythological creatures, fairytales, human and non-human practices, interviews, rituals, recordings, observations, newspaper articles etc. During the workshop, various art-based research methods will be discussed to kick-start the process. Participants will then introduce their river territories through the gathered material before stitching the subjective anthology together.