A river is a watershed. We don’t know where a river begins because it comes from so many different places…just like an idea.
Last year I heard news that Robert Macfarlane was writing a new book about rivers titled ‘is a river alive?’ This news came a few months after I had asked that same question in a workshop held at Paradise Works when thinking of the River Irwell who had recently been named the no.1 most polluted river in England and Wales.
A year later I am sat between two strangers at the Royal Geographical Society whose academic conference I have just been accepted into and who have recently given me a grant towards my fieldwork. The grant is slight but ‘important on my CV’ (it is mostly going to the people who will help me to transcribe interviews/edit material), the conference means I am welcome into the geography discipline - sounds, images, text, blurry interdisciplinary included.
I don’t know at which stage I began to believe in myself this much, but I do know the roots of this research and why it is important that I do it.
Recently on a tired-overthinking lull I looked to its origins for support - a research proposal from 2019 about processes of social housing in Manchester told through documentary film and community engagement, and an arts proposal from 2020 about working with communities along the River Shannon - exploring my own heritage and collecting stories, sounds and images from different communities along its banks. Both went through processes of rejection and enlightenment, both merged into one proposal and became the work that I am now carrying out full time.
Work that feels like a river - its source being mine and my families experiences of social housing processes in Manchester at the hands of gentrification, along with a lifelong love of rivers and the earth, of sound, image, poetry, and history that often falls between the margins; usually told in retrospect through someone else’s words.
On arriving at the RGS last night I refrained from telling myself this place is too fancy for me. Instead I say that I belong here as much as the next. By the end of the night I have exchanged details with the stranger to my right and the stranger to my left holds my hands, looks into my eyes and wishes me luck. I somehow have both names etched in my mind. There is much to say about the talk and about these interactions. I later wish to myself that each of my encounters with strangers and non-strangers are as gentle and nurturing. That only softness, openness and support exists in my life and in all of my interactions, in all my collaborations.
‘Hope is a discipline’ says RM last night. I am deciding to crystallise my wishes into hope.
I am also deciding that I am presently in the body of the river, working with brilliant people and water whose life lives on through our creative encounters. The different elements of this work feels like tributaries and I am wondering if at some point it will feed a new river, move through an estuary and join forces with an ocean.
