Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Rivus: A Glossary of Water
Author: ROCA JOSE/SALAZAR JUAN FRANCISCO
Format: HARDCOVER
Imprint: BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
Price: $79.95
Publishing status: Active
The 23rd Biennale of Sydney: rivus at the MCA presents works that reflect on our relationship with the natural world.
Rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems feature in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, titled rivus, as dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency. Rivers are the sediment of culture. They are givers of life, routes of communication, and places of ritual, but also sewers and mass graves. They are witnesses and archives, our memory. They have also been co-opted as natural avenues for the colonial enterprise, becoming sites of violent conflict driven by greed, exploitation, and the thirst to possess. Indeed, the latin root rivus, meaning a brook or stream, is also at the origin of the word rivalry.
Indigenous knowledges have long understood non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be protected. But only recently have animals, plants, mountains, and bodies of water been granted legal personhood. If we can recognise them as individual beings, what might they say?
rivus at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia is imagined as a passage through deep time, vibrant matter, and dark psychological waters. Its 22 participants explore connections between human and non-human worlds, making links between earthbound and watery beings and cosmic and terrestrial waterways. Tensions between systems of nature and culture flow through the rivus exhibition, as do themes of fluidity and interdependence, and the precarious relationship all life on earth has to water.
ISBN: 9780958040327
Edition: 01