 Bonjour, moi je suis très contente de vous dire hello and welcome. Mon anglais est toujours très mieux que mon français, mais ça va changer. Hello, I'm very happy to be able to welcome you. I'm Bettina Stantwick, the director of this museum. Yes, we have this fantastic show by Zoe Leonard, and that's why we have this symposium today. I looked at the whole programme and it's super, super interesting. So you're facing a very exciting day today. So I have some notes for the introduction. Together with our partners of the Unigir Centre for Borders Studies, we are delighted to welcome you at the Moodham for the Symposium River in Borders, organized within the framework of Zoe Leonard's exhibition All Rio to the River. So you can see this exhibition until June 6. And Zoe Leonard's show is a result of five years of work along the Rio Grande. As you can see in the show you can go along the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo while walking throughout this exhibition. From 2016 to 2021, Leonard photographed along the 2,000 kilometers where the river is used to demockate the international boundary between the United States and Mexico. The Borders Studies of CODURS and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting artwork which is composed of more than 500 photographs highlights the multiple facets and the often contradictory influences that define today this border river. The river as a natural environment. The river as a built environment. The river as a political feature. But also the river as a place that is surrounded by life. A line of water that is at the heart of a borderland that is particularly rich in terms of cultures, cross influences and languages. All Rio to the River is also more generally a work about the role that borders play in our daily lives. And the way borders determine who we are as society. The exhibition is accompanied by an equally ambitious publication and two volumes edited by Tim Johnson and published in collaboration with Hachikans. One volume gathers the photographs of Zoe Leonard and it's like walking throughout the exhibition you walk through the books. The other one is composed of an impressive collection of essays, interviews and poems. Some of the writers are here today. And it's also writing about the Rio Grande and its multiple facets. Because it's such an impressive also metaphor for a lot of what is going on in society at the moment. So three of them are actually here to be precise. Thank you CJ Alvarez. Thank you Catherine Frasarius. Thank you Elizabeth Elisabeth Dubovici to be precise for your wonderful contributions to these books. I think it's also the source of inspiration for the development of this symposium. During the course of the preparation of the exhibition and the publication, the idea of organizing a symposium emerged and it was reinforced by the possibility to collaborate with three amazing partners located in the greater region around Luxembourg which are part of the network of the UNI, I'm saying it wrongly, I know that. The UNI Center for Border Studies I think. It's the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Luxembourg. It's the North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Universitat de Saarlandes, the Trier Center for American Studies at the Universitat Trier. We would like to express our warm thanks to the institutions for the collaboration and also to persons who have helped us to conceive and organize the symposium. It's Dr. Christian Wille, Senior Researcher in Cultural Border Studies at the University of Luxembourg. Professeur Dr. Astrid Fellner, Chair of North American Literatures and Cultures at the Universitat de Saarlandes. Professeur Dr. Nile Savallisch, Assistant Professor of American Literature at Trier Center for American Studies. Professeur Dr. Gert Holm, Professor of American Literature and Culture in the Department of English Studies at the Universitat of Trier. Unfortunately, he can't come with us but he sends his best wishes. River in Bordes is the result of a collaboration between the stream team of scholars specialized in the fields of border studies and American culture and the educational and curatorial services of Moudam. The variety of the panel of speakers that we will hear today testify of the richness of their conversation. We would like to thank the seven speakers for accepting our invitation for being with us today. Thank you, Rebecca Taneshu, Dr. Ivo Duncan, C.J. Alvarez, Elizabeth Lebovici and Catherine Parceria. Dr. Daniela Johannes, Daniela Johannes can't be with us because of COVID but she will give her lecture via Zoom. Good that this is possible today. And Professor Dr. Astrid Fellner. Three online lectures were also organized by the three universities in the weeks preceding the symposium. Thank you also to Fabio Santos, Anna-Elisa Gomez-Lariz and Carlos Moten for the lectures. At Moudam, I would also like to especially thank Chloe Rajarouana from the public department who has coordinated the organization of the symposium. Some of you have visited the Leonard's exhibition in the last months or maybe even this morning before the start of the symposium. It will be also possible to see this exhibition to the lunch break. So we have also two mediators who are invited to come with us on a tour and to get more and maybe deeper insight besides the symposium. So please don't miss it. And in connection to the symposium today we are also delighted to present in Moudam's studio on the upper floors of the museum a project created by a group of students coming from Zalons University and for Petro Moïla-Blexi National University in Ukraine. It's called Borderland Stories and I think especially we should also when we have a war on the European soil we should also think that we really have to support our friends from Ukraine. This is only also a very small part but we are very happy to have this here. And finally I wanted to mention the three screenings that Moudam is organizing in the next days and weeks in connection to the Leonard's exhibition. The screenings will take place on Sundays, May 22nd, May 29th and June 5th in this very same auditorium here and we include films by Chantal Ackermann, Maya Darin and Marta Ferreira amongst other you find the program on our website but now I really spoke a lot. I hope you're having a wonderful day and I'm giving the floor to Christian Diller. Thank you very much for the first welcome words. I would also like to welcome you to our symposium today and for me the situation is different. My French is better than English than my English but it doesn't matter. I prepared some welcome in English and I would like to start my welcome speech with a big thank you because we and we already talked about it we, that means from the University from the University of Luxembourg we would like to thank very much to the colleagues from the MUDAM Museum because as the UNIDR Center for Border Studies we were very happy about your cooperation request last year and I think we worked excellently together with the MUDAM people in preparing today the programme of the symposium in preparing our guest lecture in the last month and so forth. So many thanks to the IKIP of the MUDAM for this very positive experience that I think we would like to continue today together. But I would also like to express my thanks on behalf of the UNIDR Center for Border Studies to all those who have come to Luxembourg and are with us today we are spending the day together with our speakers who come from four different countries with students and colleagues from the University of Austria University of Luxembourg with some artists with citizens from the greater region and many other attendees, participants who will still join us. I think we will have a larger audience perhaps in the afternoon we will see that later. I have mentioned the UNIDR Center for Border Studies twice now please allow me some words some few words about the UNIDR Center for Border Studies. It is a network of 30 researchers 30 researchers or border scholars who work on the borders who work on borders and who work at the universities in the cross border region where we are in the so-called traitor region you know what I think. It means that the network includes border researchers from Saarland, from Wynand Palatinate in Germany, from Wallonia in Belgium from the Conest region in France and from Luxembourg and I'm sure that it will not surprise you if I tell you that this diversity of the different locations of the UNIDR Center for Border Studies reflects also the profile of the cross border research network the distinguish between territorial border studies cultural border studies and linguistic border studies these are three very important dimensions of the border but they are or they can also be entangled and I think we will see that more in detail today in our discussion so we already heard that borders are again a very important topic in the political agenda borders are again in the center of social debates and the idea that you remember the idea that we are healing for a borderless world has finally turned out to be in the Tokyo and I think this is particularly demonstrated by the fact that the signs of the border the border studies the signs of the border are now more than ever popular and especially in demand and at the same time in border studies in recent decades different trends can be observed in the way borders have been discussed in the way borders have been thought about first the border is hardly considered as a static line that lies passively on a map the border is rather understood as a performative thing a performative thing a performative thing that produces border realities that makes emerging border realities and you focus here in border studies primarily on change that means on the fact that border realities can be shaped and thus border realities can also be spaces of possibilities what does it mean spaces of possibilities that means possibilities of connection possibilities of hybridity possibilities possibilities of empowerment Another focus especially in cultural border studies is on the process of how border realities emerge it means in here power critical perspectives are taken and questions are asked about who or what is involved in such processes and in what way and what resistances, contestations processions and so on will take place more to make it short it is about critical and complex zooming on bordering processes on borderization or as one says in French on processus de frontierisation another trend that is increasingly found in humanities but has only recently been received in border studies is the so called human perspective this perspective inscribes inscribes to what is also called posthumanism you know it I think and here in addition to people or institution institutional actors materialities are included in approaches to bordering processes materialities are then understood as active parts and I think that's important as active parts in the co-construction of border realities and materialities as a term, as a category and encloses very different things if you have a look in literature, in research you can discover very different things that can range from trees from walls, enemies viruses artifacts in general but also sounds and secrets and it is exactly such a more than human perspective on borders that we will discuss today because today we take a closer look at the nexus of territory, power and water using the example of rivers or in other words using the example of river rain borders with materialities, with its sociologics behind instrumentalisations identity politics and so forth and to do this we invited seven speakers seven colleagues who already have analysed and reflected about such river rain borders and I think not I think, I'm sure that these analysed and reflections were in very different disciplinary perspective and I'm very much looking forward to your talk and to the discussion this morning we will get some insights into border realities on the Mosa River the Evers River on the Yocanda and I think or I hope that we will get more become more familiar with the idea how rivers can be accomplices of the border and this afternoon in these talks we will learn more about the dynamics, about the nature of borders it will be about hybrid identities and that is border lands in a metaphorical sense and their productive potentials thank you in any case to our guests for being with us today thank you to our guests for sharing your research for sharing your ideas your reflections on borders and your ideas about this connection this connection between rivers water and water but we have, we already talked about one project the project Waterland Stories and my colleague Astro-Trailner would like to say a few words about that thank you good morning welcome it is a great pleasure for me to be here this morning thank you I can only agree with my colleague Christian Wille because we've been very much looking forward to this event me and my students who are also here and also a big hello and welcome to everyone who is joining us at home because I believe we're also live streaming this event now this has been a very or is a very special occasion in several ways and much already has been said but let me just you know explain this from my perspective I'm an Americanist and so for me as an Americanist who has lived in the greater region now for almost well actually more than 12 years I'm always very thrilled and it's actually quite rare here you know to have an exhibition by an American artist and so when I heard that Moudam was organizing this great exhibition on the work of Zoe Lennard I was just you know wow you know this is just great so thank you very much and I hope that you all get a chance to see the exhibition which is upstairs and then of course I'm very happy to be able to collaborate with my new colleague Professor Savallesh at Three Year University and this is also a wonderful occasion my pioneering crime as I refer to Christian Villa you know to bring our students together and organize this study day today well and since the if you look at the exhibition since El Rio the river is so prominent obviously so right in Zoe's photograph it was clear to us that the topic of this study day of this small workshop would actually you know be on the topic of the river so we focus as my colleague has just pointed out on riverine borders here on border materialities and we will see that you know we will pick up the river as a key trope you could say in all of our different presentations now when I came here to Moudam on February the 25 I believe it was for the opening of this exhibition it was actually the day after the 24 of February right when the world was you know changed and we were all paralyzed by what had happened that morning at the time you know I had been involved in researching and teaching and teaching collaboration really with several colleagues at the National University in Ukraine and I've been doing this since 2014 really and it was just until the beginning of February this year that we were involved in the compilation of a multimedia students project together with my colleagues and we were just about to finish this project and our students this was a team teaching project our students were involved collaborated with each other and compiled long reads so called long reads in the form of a landing page with short film clips and this was a project that was conducted online a team teaching project and was made possible by the EVZ foundation which is a foundation in Germany that fosters a collaboration between Ukraine and Germany particularly when it comes to the younger generation so it's a youth dialogue program and I really want to thank the MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM MUDAM Donc je veux commencer par l'introduction du concept de l'hydrosocialité et puis on va essayer de comprendre cette idée de l'hydrosocialité en regardant le Moselle-River, qui est un étudiant sur le côté de ma recherche géographique, et je pense que vous avez tous probablement connecté à l'hydrosocialité, donc plus tard on peut vous parler de vos expériences. Nous allons regarder le Moselle-River comme étudiant, nous allons voir comment le Moselle-River a aussi une connexion entre les portes et nous allons apprendre sur le Moselle-River comme un écosystème porté. Donc je veux commencer par cette photo qui a probablement été seen the last time in school or so, in biology class. So this picture shows the hydrological cycle, the cycle that water, the physical cycle that water does around the world. So from the oceans the water evaporates, condenses into clouds and then rains down or slows down back to the earth, builds glaciers, our rivers feeds our groundwater bodies that flow back into the ocean. But if we want to understand the connectedness of social and natural materials systems like we do when we talk about riverine borders, we need to take a closer look in how this hydrological cycle is actually connected to our human activities. And for this I want to introduce you to the concept of hydro-sociality which was developed by two geographers Jamie Linton and Jessica Butts. And they have this picture which is not so beautiful but a functional explanation of the hydrological cycle where we can see how that water is not only this materiality, so it's not only H2O, but it's how we use water as a resource and this is negotiated in powerful conflicts sometimes, concerns how we distribute water, how we use it and which kind of technologies and infrastructures we build to use water. And this also then influences the materiality of water, so we see them in the interconnectedness. And Linton and Butts describe the hydro-social cycle as not concurrent with water per se, but with these hydro-social relations and the social natural processes by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time. And this is exactly what we are going to explore when we are looking at the Moselle River. And we're going to see how the states, different political actors, different economic actors influence the river and the river transform the river and how this is also connected to border-making in the greater region. So to understand this we're going now to look at the Moselle River and I am using here different maps, so I'm taking a geographical approach and we are going to look at these maps to see the river from different perspectives and we are going to see different statements from people. I have interviewed in my research, but also from historical events. So we're going to start with this picture that shows the Moselle's position in Europe and it's just a very classical map that shows the bordering countries and where the river is flowing. So the Moselle is a 544 km long, partially dammed, transboundary river. The source is in the Watt Mountains and France and it merges with the Rhine River in Koblen. It was panelized in the 1960s for shipping and until now one of the most important rivers for this greater region. Before the 1950s, the Moselle was a free-flowing river with moving sediment and very rich biodiversity. But after the second world war, you know that there were like economic interests, countries wanted to rebuild their economies and especially from pushed for regulation and canalization of the river because they had economic interests, they wanted to make the river navigable for ships that could carry up to 1,500 tonnes of goods. And this was because in the northern part of France in Lorraine, there was the steel industry and they were very interested in getting the river canalized. So with this they could have easier access to the Rhine River and with that access to the main Atlantic seaport, to Rotterdam, which meant easier and cheaper access to the world market for the steel products. And then on the German side, there was a lot of controversy about that there was this fission, there was still this post-war tension, especially in the Ruhr area, where there was also a strong emerging coal and steel industry. There were very much against this project, there were really hard fights and resistance and they still talked about like being enemies and it was a very difficult situation. But then in the 1950s, the reason why the river in the end was canalized had to do with another border conflict that was still lying there after the war. So the Salle region at that point still belonged to France and was especially under economic control of France. And they had a referendum, they were asked if they still want to belong to France or not. And they over 60% voted with no, which was interpreted by the German side as they want to belong to Germany. So it was this still, yeah, un resolve border conflict that created the decision to make this deal. So Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor, German Chancellor at that time, decided with a lot of politicians and economic actors against him that the Moselle should be canalized as a territorial deal to reintegrate the Salle region back to Germany. So the treaty was signed on the same day for the canalization of the Moselle River and the reintegration of the Salle land to Germany or western Germany at that time. So in this map you see the red part of the Moselle, it's the part that has been canalized. And it was a very fast canalized or regulation of the river that only took eight years from 56 to 64. And it included the construction of 14 sluices and hydropower plants and dams that changed the whole hydromopology of the river. So it changed everything that we are like our romantic image that we maybe have of free flowing rivers now. It's more like a lot of lakes with slowly flowing water that are like a change after each other. And with this material transformation of the river, there came also a dispersive and political transformation of the cross-border relations between the countries. And this was especially present during the inauguration of the infrastructure river, which you can see here. So the presidents of Luxembourg and France and Germany, they took this crew to inaugurate the river from France from Aparc to Trier. And just as an example, to show you how it changed, this talk from enemies to friends as an excerpt of the speech of Charles de Gaulle that he did after this inauguration. He said, now, on the banks of this river, the trust and friendship to which the people of France, Germany and Luxembourg have henceforth joined, and so many terrors, so much dragging, so much pain of which this river has been for centuries, the vain cause and the sad witness. So we can see that in this case, society and water and most specifically borders and rivers are interconnected and make each other. And now, like from this historical transformation of the river, I want to bring you to the actual border between Germany and Luxembourg. So I just took this map of Google Maps that's probably very familiar to all of you, and we see the Moselle, and the border depicted, I guess, a straight line cutting through the water. And on the other, in the other picture, we see a little boy and you cannot, you cannot see it, but there's a tiny, tiny European flag on top of it. OK. So, on this point marks the spots where these three borders, the border triangle is. And I learned about it when I visited the Schengen Museum and talked with the director about the treaty and what this meant for the area. And then she pointed me to this boy and she said, we have marked the point on the Moselle with this boy where the three countries actually meet. And we really only did that because at some point it was no longer feasible for us to always explain to people, yes, back there, because so many people asked about this point. There's not a day in the tourist information office where people don't ask where is the point where the three countries meet, so there's always a fascination. But although this end going back here, although this map shows a straight border line splitting the river and the boy marks this exact meeting point, it does not depict the real river border. Because the Moselle between Germany and Luxembourg is not a city-defined border line because the water body belongs to both countries at the same time. It is a shared territory, a liquid territory that is called a condominium where the German border ends on the Luxembourgish border riverbank and the Luxembourgish border ends on the German riverbank. And so in this sense there could have been no better place to sign the Schengen agreement which was also signed on a boat on the Moselle river because this is the exact space that defies this kind of exact demarcation. And still there is this interest to fix a border, this interest to find a spot where we can pinpoint, where we can orient ourselves to. And I think this is interesting when we think about rivers and borders that is really hard in this kind of fluid spaces to find a fixed line that in this case actually neither materially nor legally exists. So when we come out from this rivers and states border, now we continue to the river is an infrastructure and we can see that in this, when we look at this map it shows the network system of waterways in Germany that of course cross borders within the country but also states borders and are connected to wider network of navigable rivers. And this is nothing new, rivers have always been used as a way to transport things to cross borders to make connections. And this is, that's why I brought you this picture of the statue over there. When we stay in this area we especially know this that this area was conquered by the Romans almost 2000 years ago. And what did they use? They used the rivers to expand the territories, to colonize territories and to build settlements along the rivers. So Trier is the oldest city in Germany that was conquered by the Romans. And this ship is the famous wine ship of Neumargin. You can see it in the museum in Trier dates back to 220 AC. And in archaeology there's also discussion that this was actually a war ship. So the Romans used this to transport their troops, to transport supply for warfare and in peaceful times they also used it to transport other goods. And the other picture you can see here in the 16th century they can also see little boats transporting goods. So this idea of conquest and expanding frontiers has also a lot to do with the way we use rivers across borders and to create new frontiers. As we have seen or when we talked about the canalization, so this is still the case. The river is still used as a navigation route. And one interesting thing I think I came across was when I talked to the Mobile Commission that is a T3 patrate organization that governs the shipping route. And I talked to the secretary and she explained to me that at that point they were working on a new system to make it easier for the skippers to navigate the Moselle. And she said they were working on this IT system that was supposed to help the skippers to not notice when he reports that he has just crossed the border. So even these technologies are created to synchronize a smooth and borderless migration along the river and even to make people forget that they are actually border. So they shouldn't even notice when they are following the river. And this is also the case, not only when people drive along the river but also when they cross from one riverbank to the other. So as an example, I've brought you the twin villages of Wasserbilisch and Luxembourg and Oberbilisch in Germany that you probably all know. And when I was there, I could spend today with the ferry captain, Peter, and he would drive on the ferry the whole day. At some point I completely lost track of like how many times we've crossed because we were like always going back and forth, back and forth. And yeah, it was a crazy experience. But before I met him, the pandemic started. And that was a really point that influenced this area a lot because the villages, they have this, I mean the ferry connection can be traced back to the 15th century. So there has always been this connection between the two villages. Also there were shifting territorial belongings in history, sometimes they belonged to the same territory, then they were separated again, but they had always this connection across the water. And when the pandemic hit, I mean, everybody knows it here that the borders were closed from Germany to Luxembourg, which also meant that the ferry connection was shut down for two months, which really changed like everyday routines of the people because the next bridges where you can cross the river are about 10 kilometers away. And when I met Peter, the ferry captain, I was talking to him about the time and about his job and his experience. And I asked him, do you perceive the river as a border or not? And he said, no, why? It's all open. And I asked because you are the connection, so to speak. And he said, yes, it's all open. I don't see any reference to say it's somehow a border. It's all open. Everything is open and it's also nice that way. And I asked him, could you have imagined that it would become a border again as it was now due to COVID? And he said, I think that after the second decision, nobody, nobody thought it would be possible. So these closed borders seemed like an impossibility for those leading trans border and cross river lives. But the pandemic has shown how fragile these border textures are and how contingent these practices of bordering are and that openings and closing can come very quickly and can have different impacts for different people at different times. So it's not as static as we might think it is when we just look at the map. So now I want to take you out of this reflection of the river state border and infrastructure and how we cross it or use it to cross borders. I want to come to the materiality of the river itself. So this map shows the catchment area of the Moselle River, which means all the small little rivers and water bodies that are connected to it and that flow into the river so that feeds the Moselle with the water. And we see how in this picture, the actual state borders, they vanished. And you can also see that it expands much into Belgium. So the water creates its own kind of territoriality, the hydrological territory and its own spatiality. And this also has to do with the agency of water, so because it has its own ways to flow, its own direction across borders, of course, across human borders. And this affects how we manage water bodies. In this picture, you can see the nuclear power plant of Cardinum, which you also know. And it lies at the border between Anttiens, but close to the border to Germany and Luxembourg, and it uses the Moselle River water to cool down the reactors. And this water is taking out a massive amount of water, and then after being cleaned, it goes back to the river, but it's heated. So the river water is heated and there's also some left over chemicals. You can't filter out everything. But this, of course, has effect downstream, across the border, because the water flows in one direction. And this leads to the necessity to somehow govern these flows across the border. And that's why the EU created this water framework directive that regulates the quality, quantity of water. And they asked the countries of trans-boundary water bodies to come together and to find common solutions for these problems. And when I interviewed one employee of the International Commission for the Protection of the Moselle and Bazaar, that are concerned with these water framework directives, he said there could also be measures that would perhaps have a positive impact on one side of the border, but that could have a negative impact, for example on a ground water body that is on the other side of the river. The essential work of our commission is to align and set goals at the borders. So it is especially at the borders where water flows over these political borders, where is the focal point of the water governance. And this, of course, leads to different problems because of water's materiality and agency that leads then to power imbalances because the country that is upstream has always a better standpoint than the countries which are downstream. And we continue with this last picture that is the Moselle River, but we see it now in its three dimensionality. And when we see this, we can also see the different towns where there are sluices and barrages and hydropower plants, so where the river is cupped like in the stairs. And when we look at this picture, we may realize that the rivers are not liquid lines, they are three dimensional living spaces for also other than human inhabitants. And in my research, I especially focus on fish and fish, migratory fish, which are also border crossers par excellence. And I research eel in the Moselle. So in the one picture, we can see the migratory path of the eel. They live in the European freshwater systems and then for reproduction have to travel all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the Sagasso Sea, that is where the Bermuda triangle is. And they reproduce there and the babies swim back to Europe. But because of the transformation of rivers with barrages and hydropower plants, they have become critically endangered. So there is a loss of up to 98% of the whole population of eels. And that's why I company Eels Conversation Initiative for Longue de Moselle. So this is one of the fishermen I go along with to do eel catching. And they catch the eel and carry them to the Rhine River, set them out there, so they could swim, in theory, swim to the Atlantic. And the problem is that the damage potential of these turbines is particularly high for these animals. In some cases, an animal is hit several times by such a blade and injured in different parts of the body or the body is also just cut through. And because all of them have to reproduce, this is of course of enormous importance for the population in the Moselle catchment area. So there's also no way to reproduce eel artificially. There's only this wild species. And in that case, the river that has been infrastructureed by humans because of economic interests, because of political and border-making reasons, the river has become a border space for these eel who have to migrate for reproduction. And these river infrastructure borders have become an existential threat to these fish and of course also to other species in this ecosystem. So we have moved now all along the river from this river-state border as an infrastructure as an ecosystem. When we think about back to the hydro-social cycle, we have seen how society and political, the political interests and different conflicts come together with this river and its materiality and we've seen how they make and remake each other over time. So to sum up, I'd say that hydro-social borders are ambiguous sites of political negotiation and material transformation. They are always in motion and enable the movement of people, things and territories. But of course they can also block this kind of movements. I think as we will see in the next presentation, for example, when there's a flood movement is blocked, but also migration across the river can be very terrifying and difficult and dangerous. And the river or hydro-social borders are also three-dimensional living spaces transcending these human borders. So I think or thinking about this hydro-social borders has the potential to challenge and shift our presumptions about liquidity and validity, about permeability of borders and stability, but also about flux and control of these border spaces and of rivers. Thank you. To start the discussion a bit, I have a general question, one question that I'm thinking about since a lot of times, this is the fascination of the border. You presented the results of the interview of the director of the Schengen Museum in Schengen. And it's really very interesting because the Bouye, or Bouye in English, then they put it was really because it was demanded by people to have an orientation to materialize the fascination of the border. But I would like to know, perhaps it's an open question to the whole audience, what is the fascination of the border? And what the director said about what the fascination is? Yeah, we were talking about, especially about tourists also coming from other countries. She told me that there were, for example, a lot of tourists from Asia, but also from Turkey. And they were super fascinated about this space where you can just, where the borders are open, where you can just walk across the brits in a different country, and that that is possible without checks, without control. So they were kind of, they had the need to bring this together in their brains. But then at the same time, we wanted to see the spot where the border is, because the border was not materially or physically present in any other way, because it's like an open space where you can move freely. And they couldn't bring it together, but there is a border, we cannot see it. So they had this need to fix it, really make it visible on the river, but which is of course contradictory, but because the river, there is no spot on the river that is at least the border between Germany and Luxembourg, because it's the whole water body, it's there. This means the fascination is the invisibility of the border, but at the same time, there's a need for visibility. Thank you. I just wanted to add that I think it's a lot about orientation. I think what the people are looking for is orientation. They need to know where the border is, and if we hadn't, if we didn't have any time, for example, of now you're in a different country, I think it would be, they would be even more confused, I would say. So I think this, just to add to what has been said, that orientation is I think a very important point, which is related to fascination, and to this need of to know where are we, and where is the space in which we are moving. Yeah, it's also the need to create space, to navigate ourselves in this spatial world, and with the other example of the skippers, where they were attempting to create a different kind of spatiality, spaces without borders, just flows in the landscape. So it's because they have a different need for orientation, they are moving all the time, and that's why they're not supposed to be stopped by any kind of borders. So Rebecca, I'm so impressed with your work, and I, this is the reason why I love coming to Europe, and talking about borders with people over here, because I always learn so much. And one of the things that struck me as most kind of mind boggling to me, coming from the United States, is that the big penalization, internalization projects began in the 1950s, whereas by the 1950s in North America, everything had been hammered already for the previous three decades at least. And so we were kind of done destroying our, embracing up watersheds in North America, Mexico included. And so could you tell us a little bit more, tell me at least, because I'm so fascinated by this, a little bit more about the broader context of damming, large-scale hydrological engineering in European watersheds. Yeah, I think, or at least I can tell you for this area. Of course, there have been canalization, regulation projects in European and German rivers before the 1950s, but especially this area, because it is a borderland area, it's the border space. There were so many conflicts about the river, it was just a transboundary river, and this area has experienced many wars. So this has always been, I mean it has been discussed to canalize the river since 1800, something, something, but it never happened, because the parties could not agree where to start the canalization or not, and this border zone has always been quite tricky in times of war. It was, I mean, they were, for the French-Germany war, they built train tracks along the river to carry troops and supply, but the river has not been touched before and was really only after the war that France and Germany started to talk again about this project, and it was also because there was this treaty in Europe, the Steel and Coal Union, that was formed before even the EU institutions, so that was actually the start of this European cooperation, and it was also used as a pressure from France to push for the canalization because they said we have this treaty of steel and coal, and this means that we all should have the same starting point, or how do you say, we shouldn't have to compete in that way that we are now competing, because we are like one space, and we should have the same arrangements or conditions for production and export of these products. They used this European Treaty actually as part of the negotiation to push for the canalization, and also the Mouvelle is a pretty small, it's not a big river, and other rivers were maybe more important to be canalized before. Maybe to make a little, I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a question, don't you think, that this idea of canalization in the early sixties has also something to do with the larger map of the nationalization by Nasser of the Suez Canal, which happened in 1956, I mean it's not so far, and I think it's kind of a larger consequence of that Mouvelle, which was an enormous move, a decolonizing move in fact. Rebecca, always amazing to speak, I'm really interested in this kind of contradiction in terms of the hydro-social border, because it's kind of a hydro-social, it's kind of as Linton and Bud and others define it as something which is about the co-constitution between communities and the water body, and then, so in your research, I'm then thinking about how when you're interviewing a fisherman from one of the three nations states, how then might a fisherman from the other nations work into this space, I'm just thinking about how do the different countries, do they hydro-socialy connect and co-constitute with the water bodies in different ways, or is there a common kind of connection? I'm thinking about this specifically because the water bodies I'm dealing with, it's been sent through since that kind of level of communication across the water had been possible. I was seeing that we learned photos of children playing in the Rio Grande, that would be impossible in this particular river because of militarisation, so it's interesting to then think about in this condition, how then, not only the fisherman might be engaging, but also just people who are less engaged, I think the fisherman might speak to the river and be engaged. I think that's very different because especially the Moselle is very different in the three countries, so it's not like one river that is always the same, where the source is, the river in France, the river is not canalised, so it's still like a free flowing river, there's also one part that is called Moselle Sauvage, it's like a natural protected area with a free flowing sediment and the river grounds is built and rebuilt themselves, but still in that part, for example, they take out the sediments and the sand and stones for construction. And then the French part is very much characterised by industries, so they are big companies, like soda companies and the nuclear power plant is much more industrialised river and then we come to this part in Luxembourg, in Germany, especially then north of Trier, it's characterised by a very rural area with wine cultivation and very steep valleys and this, of course, the landscape changes all the time and this affects how people relate to the river and what they do with the river and when it comes to fishing, so actually the Moselle in the German part of the Moselle is the last river in Germany that is actually fully served by fishermen, like by professional fishermen. So every from one dam to the other is always rented by fishermen and they fish, for example, I think it's rural in English, I don't know, but what do you eat here in Luxembourg is frittier de la Moselle. So I talked to a fisherman who fished the fish for frittier de la Moselle, which is the kind of national dish in Luxembourg that's fried fish from the river and like as a bordering example, also he fished the fish for a long time, it is his livelihood, he goes out to the river every day to catch the fish and this was also interrupted by the pandemic because of course not only the borders closed, but everything was shut down and the restaurants were shut down where he sells his fish so in Luxembourg the restaurants all closed and this really interrupted his fishing practices. So yeah, just as an example. Okay, I think we can take one more question but then I think we have to slowly move on to the next presentation and there is one question here in the back, so I'll pass the mic to you Tobias. Thank you for your very interesting talk and you've touched upon this, I think, but since you mentioned that the steel and coal mining industry has been largely made redundant, I wonder if there are any measures being taken perhaps even transnationally to re-naturalize parts of the river. So out of curiosity could you tell us more about this besides the project that you're working on with Eels ? Well, there are no attempts to let's say deconstruct the barrages and dams and hydropower plants because that would be like a massive transformation and would have also very unclear outcomes. But so the river was infrastructureed but once the service process is never ending because the river is like the water has certain kind of materiality that of course influences any kind of construction so there's constant work to repair, to rebuild, to transform the river so infrastructureing is an ongoing continuous process is never finished and one colleague of mine, she said like infrastructure is always broken. So there's continuous work and this also includes working on the river in terms of ecological terms because also our relation to the environment has changed since the 50s and this has also put down in law especially in European law with water framework directives but also other environmental laws and this means that for every construction that you do in the river you have to compensate these things ecologically so there are no big transformations but they are building like small islands and built areas where the water is more still so fish can breathe there so there are a lot of these for small transformations or before like 20 years before they really cut down the vegetation on the river banks because they wanted it to look neat and clean and nice and people who are living on the river they were complaining about yeah I want to see the river from my window so please cut down the trees but of course this has also changed because yeah perception or knowledge about ecosystems has changed and we know that we need the trees and the bushes and the grass to grow because it's this exact living space for aquatic species but also other species along the river so yeah there's this like small transformation also happening All right well thank you very much for these wonderful and lightning words great talk always a pleasure I couldn't agree more with actually our next speaker right that that this is a wonderful topic and you will of course stay with the topic so our next speaker is what's your first name I forget Ivor Duncan who I could come up to the floor I don't know where the camera is I'll go here right next to you who is a writer, artist and interdisciplinary researcher who focuses on the overlap between political violence and water ecosystems he is a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the Kaira Postetting University in Venice Ivor holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Research, Architecture, Goldsmith entitled Hydrology of the Powerless and is developing a book project Necrohydrology a concept which exists where the knowledge and corresponding management of water in its multiple forms is produced as adversarial to life and positions and positions human and environmental justice as intrinsically connected this sounds very complicating to me but I'm sure that you will explain all of this in a great way Ivor is also visiting lecture at the Royal College of Art and today he is here or do you also live in the greater region because you do live in that well it's a suburb to the greater region I think Paris is a suburb to here so welcome to the greater region and we're very much looking forward to your talk on weaponizing the river thank you thank you very much yeah well it probably will just remain at that level of complexity I'm afraid there with me Just to start I just wanted to thank all the organizers and it's so wonderful to speak on this incredible panel this research is also co-produced with my dear friend Stefano Flavidis but I'll start with a little vignette from fieldwork which was done in February 2020 which is actually the 2019 it's probably the last time that such fieldwork is possible in the region it was early evening when we arrived at the migrant cemetery a fenced area overlooking Sidero a majority Turkish Muslim village around 20 kilometers from the river on the Greek side of the border except for the fencing there was little on the hillside to suggest that this field was a site of border violence the cemetery is no longer in use it's a claim that unidentified people have been buried here in mass graves on the day of our visit in February 2020 six empty graves dug months before in anticipation of people found in the river were still flooded by winter rainwater we used the hydrophone to record inside one of these empty graves the recording is almost silent the only noise present is the buzz of the game being turned up in the effort to identify any possible signal why we made the recording and what it means has been a constant question ever since these empty graves were dug for a group of people that never came they speak to death as a constant presence with something to be anticipated at the border our doubts about what these recordings mean reflects the uncertain knowledges that pervade the river border environment perhaps the silence even gestures towards an entire river ecosystem turned into a weapon the second longest river in the Balkans running for most of its 528 km through Bulgaria as the Maritza before forming the Evros in Greek or Meric in Turkish for its final 218 km this final stretch is frequently referred to as the land border or natural border between Greece and Turkey the river has remained the boundary since its delimitation by the 1923 Lazerne peace treaty in recent years it has become an established route for refugees traveling through Turkey following the failed coup in 2016 Turkish asylum seekers are also increasingly crossing the river into the EU many who cross however are not registered they are summarily arrested detained and violently returned across the river to Turkey through the illegal practice widely referred to as pushback with this presentation we will follow the river through the legacies of historic demarcations the recent use of river islands as what we call islands of hyper legalities the region's production as an embankment and finally to the delta itself where the river meets the Aegean sea as hydrologists and other river scientists think of rivers as including their entire catchments and floodplains we argue including tributaries and districtry we argue that to study a river border also requires thinking through its entire hydrology here defensive architectures extend beyond built and engineered interventions to include the processes that take place within the river as well as the fields and atmosphere of the border indeed it is clear to us that making a river a border attempts to minimise the wider ecosystem perspective in other words the bordering process reduces a diverse and rich environment to a trespass line in the national cultural imaginary when it is always more than this as is clear in the experience of those trying to cross it this reduction obfuscates how bordering conditions the environment to the adversarial while also impacting the river itself so where river waters stand between and perhaps more importantly blur the binarisms of connection division and life and death here the border regimes mobilise the river's ambiguities to produce a condition of ecological exception and violent excess one of the key questions we've been asking for a number of years in this context in relation to the Eberol is what is the role of water in the politics of death of the border opposing the material and discursive reproduction of both rivers and borders as natural weaponising a river identifies the Evers-Merich Maritza as a result of multiple organisational technologies of territorial sovereignty following the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman empire the Lazerne peace treaty identified the Evers-Merich as the border and instigated a multi-lateral demarcation committee the committee in turn deems that the border should not follow the changes in the route of the river but instead be fixed to its 1926 course Efforts to fix the river banks to this 1926 condition have been hampered by wider political tension but also by the agency of the river itself where it has carried away border markers and indeed border fences this means that there is now almost 100 years of fluvio-geomorphological variation between the drawn border and the river that it once followed as far as demarcation is concerned once the line has been drawn the water itself is no longer relevant thus at least two rivers and two borders exist in the example of the Evers-Merich the cartographic border of the old medium line and that of the new course which has become the water of the new trespass line but not the political border so here the river moves over the border and at places the border becomes dewatered the specific border water of the Evers-Merich has emerged in this century since La Zanne where hydro-social and relational thinking increasingly understand rivers as containing concentrations of multiple social political and material conditions borders on the other hand are increasingly understood as a diffusion of power and surveillance across technological, sociocultural and environmental processes often far from drawn lines of ports of entry the border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow erosion mud turbulence and fog as much as it is founded on military technology agricultural and conservation practices the geopolitics of resource logistics and border crossing in other words not only are waters harnessed as an external medium of border violence they also internalize this politics this produces a water that is heavily polluted susceptible to flooding increasingly saline close to the delta and most tellingly burying the bodies of those people displaced by conflict and illegalized in their attempts to claim asylum we discussed the impact of geopolitical conditions on the river ecosystem with the fish scientist Dr. Stamatis Vargaris from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research we know that these anomalies pour le river where there's no conservation action at any time really taking place this is a jumping in one of the causes too much of the causes when it's anger several people totally feeling that of course one of the reasons it's a mess because it's liberating to have a lot of banalism you know what I'm saying I'm I'm putting something along with the concrete and the water and the water and the water this section of river continues to be shadowed by a military buffer zone extending as far as the main road the railway line built on the levees that control the flood plain access to the buffer zone is tightly controlled and photography is prohibited creating a scarce image regime clear limitations for research and gaps in knowledge regarding the river hence why we're using so many maps and not the actual images produced on the border itself The legal scholar Dr Valentina Azarova from D Border Collective shared some per thoughts on this river We have found that in the case of the bordering practices used in rivers, like the Abbas marriage, that rather than control states accommodate the rivers changes harness the ambiguity in producing a space in a constant process of redefinition where knowledge is obscured in the shifting riverscape The border's ecology of exception is made possible by both the river's adaptability to force its flexibility and indeed the river's own force The capricious shifts of the river across drawn lines produce islands of stranded land ambiguous spaces within and around which territorial processes become less deadly In this image a large meandernet has been cut by either a change of flow or more likely through the straightening of the course There now exists an expanse of Greek earth on the wrong side of the river There are also equivalent examples of land ceded to Turkey on the Greek side These ambiguous parcels of land are also points where fatalities become concentrated Professor Pavlos Pavlidis Coroner of Evrov Prefecture and authority on postmortem conditions in the region identifies this particular area near Perez just north of the Delta as a location where 72 bodies were recovered between 2000 and 2014 In late February 2020 the Evrov Merit became a flashpoint and the Turkish government opened its borders with Greece in an attempt to exert pressure on the EU over conflict in Syria It directed thousands of refugees to the Evrov Merit with the false promise of an open route to Europe The Greek government responded by suspending asylum system and deploying police and military forces in the region Tensions lasted for several days during which at least two asylum seats have lost their lives to Greek bullets Including the murder of Mohammed al-Arab on March 2nd 2020 Forensic architecture founds that Greek soldiers were using a now dry section of riverbed in the Delta not far from this section shown here as a trench from which the fire of asylum seats stranded on such a parcel of land When the dry section of the riverbed is itself the border the isolated area it produces becomes a no man's land caught between two countries between the borderline and the border river Neither entirely one nor the other but a space in which the Greek state at least seems to think that it can act as an unity These gaps in knowledge are increasingly manipulated at the sedimentary river islands Sorry, that was the matter's vulgaris So this territorial uncertainty or this ecosystemic uncertainty utilised by the border apparatus can lead to a deadly confusion for those trying to cross As QZ who crossed the river and was returned to Turkey as many as six times in search of asylum in May 2019 prescribed on spoke with him in February 2020 As key points in the contestation of control and control of knowledge surrounding the border The islands are where some of the most brutal violence administered by the respective border regions takes place We discuss these gaps in knowledge further with Valentina and Seville Cimionidis from the border And initially we'll hear Stefanos' voice first question of the border from here and from here at the state of Constructiv it's one where things that everywhere will not be possible there can happen and from here it has been the first people of Constructiv at the state of Rome at the state of the state of the wine whereas London, Van Erdois or Mockwood was nothing to do with the state of Constructiv at the state of Constructiv I feel respect for the higher humanity the attention we have this overlap of the aspects of the temple of the water and creating this its favorite community been caused each type of important process and this is something that's compounded in the past people are very slow to keep in touch with the religion because the the river itself moves from the border zone and that's the the island that mais elle a pu entretenir la même chose. Cela reprendra maintenant un peu plus d'intruskovitz un état d'ambiguousité... et de mobiliser pour 46 ans. Ce n'était pas le cas dans notre vie. Nous voulons et je vous dit eigenly que je suis sûr que en prenant le temps pour aller en train de la faire, rassurer que ce soit dans un temps de preuve, et que ce soit en preuve, et que ce soit dans un temps de preuve, mais je pense que c'est déjà sur le stage du fait d'être dans le temps de preuve, et de faire des choses avec la vie, et de faire des choses avec la vie. C'est une question hyperlégale, c'est-à-dire ? Oui, c'est un moyen indépendant. Il y a beaucoup d'abords, des salariés, des morts, des morts... C'est très intéressant quand il vient de l'Isle. Il a dit que sur le 16 mars 2022, le court de l'éducation décide dans l'intérêt de l'éducation et de l'éducation de l'éducation, nous sommes à l'affaire pour le gouvernement. Le court 29 décembre, le court d'éducation n'a pas été annulé, mais au 18 mars 2022. Si le jeunesse des salariés est en train de... On est à la police, on est à la paix. Là, j'ai dit que c'est un amateur, mais il est grand... Est-ce que le court est le meilleur ? Mais il est très important, et je ne sais pas. Il ne faut pas faire la preuve, s'il y a un court et un upravail. Il en a un, très fort. Among the many politicians who visited during the March 2020 event was the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Accompanyed by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, von der Leyen gave a statement in which he praised Greece for being Europe's Aspira, the Greek word for shield. Her choice of vocabulary echoed local military discourse in which the region is often called Greece's Anachoma or embankment against Turkish invasion and more recently against the silent seat. Reflecting the historic and ongoing tension between Greece and Turkey, the military buffer zone runs parallel to the river, also known as the zone of security and coverage or that. With a width that varies from a couple of hundred metres to a few kilometres from the river coincidant with the extents of the flood plain, the 10,000 square kilometres buffer zone is densely surveilled. Driving through this cross-border landscape, it is quickly evident that the flood plain of the Eberos Merich is sculpted to either contain or facilitate movement, be it military personnel, civilians or water. Part of this manipulation comes in the form of flood defence burns or levees, raised embankments that often act as roads in the flood plain. These levees often double as military and anti-tank installations with concrete tunnels running within and intermittent foxholes punctuating the embanked earth. A new 26km long fence is currently under construction around the isolated parcels of land we saw before. These will also, according to the Greek Minister of Citizens Protection, quote, take into account the geomorphology of the region and will be constructed to act as a flood defence infrastructure for the protection of settlements and seals. And so you see in this kind of infrastructure the embarkation of national security and ecological management. The very drawing of a fixed yet imaginary borderline along the central course of the river and the second one along the limits of the flood plain affectively produces a river at the frontier conditioning its movements and muds to become sites where sovereign territorial imaginaries are projected. It is such a legal territorial imaginary that turns the vectors and fluid dynamics the muds and airs of the river into a weapon, the enatoma in its many forms. The diplomat Helios Dimitrikopoulos in his 1988 treaty The Land Borders of Greece describes the deltaic terrain as, quote, unabrogable during spring and winter. The medium depth of the river at the delta is 2 to 3 meters deep and the flow rate is 3,200 cubic meters an hour during the summer. The Greek bank is almost entirely swamped while the Turkish bank is somewhat higher and steep until the point where the Evros meets the Evgene river where there is a swamp as well. A ramstar-declané wetland of international importance the delta's waters, ponds and islands are home to a number of my great three bird species. 15 km-wide and filled with marshes and ponds the delta can take days to cross. People use this route due to its remoteness and loose of the trolling compared to more inhabited parts of the river. The following clip is of a group of people wading across the delta. After many years of research on the Evros the only video we have of the crossing of the delta exists in five seconds. They are wading through the turbid waters out in the open in the middle of the day. Their wading is taxing water weighing down their clothes while they are vulnerable to multiplicity of threats. We repeat the video because this five seconds is only a brief moment and a much longer journey of repetition. One that started longer before the river and often involves a series of repeated pushbacks once at the river border itself. These people are wading for a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal and cultural actives that produce the Evros as at one and the same time a riverised border and a borderised river. More so than anywhere else along the river in the delta the border exists beyond the river bank. It is in the reed in stagnant water in the mud of the expanded flood meadows as well as in the impenetrable riparian vegetation. Indeed Kuzé described this when recounting the experience of wading itself out of the river at night. There is perhaps no more fitting the line to describe the weaponisation of the river ecosystem than Kuzé's memory of being hurt by whatever he touched. This is an environment that is conditioned to hurt those who attempt to navigate it. In March 2020 while the Storks and Pelicans were flocking in and the Flamingos were preparing to head south for the summer the delta hosted a different kind of migration with army and police units operating side by side with local self-proclaimed frontiersmen guardians of the border and hunting clubs arriving from all over Greece. Joining them were far right and near Nazi militants from elsewhere in Europe and the US to help quote safeguard Europe's borders showing little regard to human life rifle in arm these militias described their operations as quote hunting for refugees end quote. In March 2020 the delta was the Anachema in full effect. As he suggested this Anachema takes multiple forms during the winter and spring months the morning fog is at its thickest as Kuzé described during his multiple cottons of the delta in March 2020 this fog conjured an old and menacing metaphor as reported in the media at the time the paramilitaries who were drawn to the area to hunt crosses quote at night and in the fog end quote were transposing the old Nazi directives Nazi evil night and fog onto the Everest delta journalists on the ground also spoke of an informational fog shrouding events referring to the diverging accounts and merging from both sides and their inability to corroborate them due to the border being inaccessible to journalists and civilians the clouded mediafic landscape is purposely maintained to make the Everest unintelligible for non-military bodies the fog analogy is particularly of potent when considered against the numerous reports of secret pushbacks arbitrary detention torture and death in the flood plain this has been legally framed by the global legal action network as enforced discurrences as in Nazi Germany in the 1940s people in the Everest disappeared at night and were involved the physical or informational material or metaphoric often mullious moments without trace or name so rather than being a natural border the delta is an exemplary case of a border nature where environmental elements which are not deadly on their own are made deadly by forcing people to traverse them under treacherous conditions through our analysis of the Everest marriage we think with the river to disentangle the full extent of the river border infrastructure border and water knowledges overlap here and fold into the management of the flood plain producing an entire ecosystem as a border technology to the extent that one could say the Everest region is all river and it is all border thinking the border through islands and through the delta in this way disambiguate its production as a simple geographic and ethnic demarcation when it is always operated in dispersed and muddy ways beyond the reductive binarism border regimes tried to sustain so to assist migrants in defending their rights to counter the obfuscating tactics deployed by the police in their use of the river as alibi and to confront the far right that assembles its forces rhetorically, environmentally and in person in the delta from seeping into increasing these the very concept of nature needs to be reframed to encompass the ways it is deployed within the military and management understanding the complexity of the river as a weaponized border ecology is crucial to reveal the ongoing and intensifying violence that unfolds across different scales in the region thus practices must be developed to perceive, hear, see and sense how border regimes harness environmental processes to see the river as a continuum from freezing fog in the valley view in the field, mud in the flood plain and carried on the clothes and the bodies the people forced to cross as clearly as it is as we see it as water flowing between the river banks themselves such practices reveal the varying watery states of the Abbas marriage as what they are the riverine Arsenal, the deadly defence architecture an entire region designed to disperse territorial technology as a violent anachema however our conversation has also revealed another side of the river and the possibility of some hope so we leave you with doctors or garrists on the river itself thank you very much thank you we are a little behind schedule but I think we can take questions to open the floor we have about 5 minutes I think 5 to 7 minutes for questions thank you for the presentation I think it's a very interesting topic I think it connects very well with Rebecca's presentation before and I think generally just taking a more a concentric approach because in the last 20 years there have been kind of a trend of granting legal rights to rivers and it was in 2008 in Ecuador in New Zealand and Bangladesh where rivers have a very large importance do you see Evros as a good candidate for that and specifically due to multi-plastic nature and I think the same question goes also for the Moselle river is this an interesting candidate for legal rights granting or as an entity I think that's a sort of two part question in some ways the first point would be that the granting of legal personhood is not necessarily the ideal condition I understand that in certain cases it can be the only route or one of many but an effective route for environmental protection but it also raises other questions about legal structures and legal systems and what is the law that is then being afforded to a river and I'm not sure but it's all work in the river system so maybe the other question is maybe critique what the law is rather than giving law giving legal personhood to an environmental figure however I mean in an ideal sense it would be great if Evros had greater protection however it's so far off I mean Stamatis is able to access it as an environmentalist but actually that's not necessarily always been the case in many ways and many of his papers are only done via remote sensing because he cannot access the water so it's very complicated I mean there's so many other elements to this including the dams and the Bulgarian Maritza element of the river so it's a complicated story I think in an ideal yes but in reality I think that's sort of far off so if I'm reading the satellite image correctly it looks like a lot of the the delta is surrounded by pretty heavily subdivided croplands and so I wonder if you could speak to the agricultural history component of what's happening here both in terms of and I'm thinking about it in two ways on one hand it's there's a local knowledge that comes with agriculture that seems kind of counterintuitive compared to this much larger geopolitical context in which a lot of the border politics are playing out but then also from a deeper history point of view we can think about agriculture as kind of the original sin in terms of the beginning of the type of environmental approach that sees nature as instrumentalist and so in that larger way I wonder if there's even some kind of connection but what has been your experience and what are your insights into the growing region that is flanking the river on both sides yeah this is a great question and of course it would have maybe too large an answer for this particular moment but certainly the agricultural practices on the Turkish side and on the Greek side differ greatly there's a lot of rice particularly on the Turkish side towards the delta most of the delta on the Greek side is actually Ramsar protected so it does have a conservationist perspective even though that's also unfolded into the military kind of control of the region but your question raises another important point the river before 1923 was a space of communication there was a thriving silk industry all along the river and you could take it all the way up to Plovdiv in Bulgaria and there were boats coming down so much like the Mosul in some ways in this respect what happens in 1973 is also this huge population exchange so many of the Greek identifying people in the Black Sea area and in Anatolia kind of came back to Greece so to speak back what is the new Greece at that moment and many of the Turkish-Muslim people identifying people were then exchanged back into what was then became modern-day Turkey and so you see these kind of there are lots of layers of history there there are still in this area the biggest populations of ethnic Turkish Muslim communities and many of those are given a responsibility of handling the bodies of those found in the river who are assumed to be of Muslim background so there are really complicated stories there however the farmers and the fishermen also provide really important access for research in the sense that how we were able to get to the river was because we went and this is what you do when you're doing research we were really disappointed because one of our meetings didn't work out and then anarchist bar in this really horrible town the guy came over and said oh I'll take you to the river I have the field there and so we were able to access it and that was the only possibility so farmers do provide this knowledge they provide an understanding and there's also complexity there in relationship to surveillance some farmers are unfolded into the surveillance regime whereas others have a political agenda that's slightly different so and fishing and hunting has a really complex story in a region like this ok thank you very much for this wonderful presentation thank you I think we are coming out to our last presentation for the morning and briefly would like to introduce CJ others to you who grew up in Las Cruces New Mexico he studied art history at Stanford and Harvard and received his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago he's currently an associate professor in the department of Mexican-American and at the University of Texas at Austin where he writes and teaches about the history of the US environmental history he is the author of the book Borderland, Borderwater a history of construction on the US-Mexico Divide his first broad sweeping history of building projects on the border and he is currently writing a book about the history of the Chihuahuan Desert the largest and least known desert in North America it's a great pleasure to have you here and we look forward to conversations afterwards and now you will give us a talk and you will bring us full circles to speak to the Rio Grande which is our river upstairs three ways to think about river history with examples from Rio Grande, Rio Bravo thank you very much and please join me in welcoming CJ Alvarez to Brudan for the invitation and to the support staff here and of course to Zolean Tim when they first reached out to me with an invitation to contribute an essay to the collected volume accompanying the exhibition catalog I was initially very skeptical because in the United States it's become a cottage industry for people to kind of come to the border do some stuff, do some quick research and go somewhere else you have to understand that despite the infamy or the fame of the US-Mexico border in North America and even globally the vast majority of Americans and the vast majority of Mexicans have never been there if they have been there they've been to one place one crossing and so I was skeptical of what it might look like I saw some sample prints of this absolutely magnum opus that Zolean had produced I realized and I looked at the way she was seeing the border, the way she was framing the border and most importantly how she was seeing and framing the river I realized that I had to jump at the chance to be part of this project and now here I am greatly honored to be here actually and see it in person I also think that as I was walking through it with the gracious Sarah Beaumont the other day I really struck me that there's no wall text there's no titles and I realized that I have a very unusual relationship with this show because having spent really my entire life along the river and along the border I could recognize pretty much every single location from which she was shooting and so I didn't need wall text and I didn't need titles and I also have a familiarity with what we might call US-Mexico border iconography in terms of just the border patrol stuff river engineering stuff certainly fence stuff and therefore it's fascinating because we have as a problem on the US-Mexico border I think it's over saturated with images in a lot of ways and I think that a lot of journalistic photography not really definitely kind of take the bait of photographing the most intentionally designed to be photogenic aspects of the security apparatus particularly the fence and so all of this made me think the worst possible viewer for this for this exhibition insofar as it's easy for me to read it from a documentary point of view and that's why I'm still looking forward to the afternoon sessions as well when we get into not just the materiality of the river but the materiality of artistic production because I think for me at least there's a real tension between the documentary and the exhibition and then the artistic I think challenges that it issues to us in terms of the scope in terms of the size of the prints in terms of the absence of a text in association with the images so I couldn't be happier to be here and share a few thoughts. A lot of what I'm going to say are actually the same things that the previous two presenters have said but in a different order and seen from a different perspective and in a different geographical context but I thought the two presentations just could not have been better and it's an honor to follow you both. It's really organized around three questions three research questions and I as a historian lap star historian have developed part largely organically by being out in the field and being out there along the river and along the line and so yeah that's the plan the first question oh this is my title slide that's the watershed we'll talk about that in a second more detail the first way to think about is to focus on the river and the question behind this is what is the river's nature and both before and Rebecca has signaled the importance of thinking holistically in terms of ideological system but I want to go a bit deeper into the implications both cross disciplinary and also philosophically about what that really means to go deeper into river history that focuses on the river itself and the watershed so this mode of analysis takes its primary object as the river itself and this is an obvious thing in the realm of the sciences this is sort of the bread and butter of hydrology botany and a lot of cases and so on and so forth you can just list all the different disciplines but it goes without saying the context of food science and laboratory science that the watershed itself is integrated and that that means something ecologically and environmentally and so from this point of view there's focus on water quality there's focus on preparing zone biology there's focus on from the point of view of ancient the reconstruction of ancient environments there's a real riverbed where the river once was and what flow might have looked like then and been like then but I think that a focus on the river also speaks to the realm of philosophy and what we can think of as an eco-centric approach and we can have a conversation about the extent to which ecocentrism is different or similar to post humanism or even missanthropy but from this point of view we understand the natural world as intrinsically important both living things, animals, plants but also even in its most extreme forms abiotic that is non looking things, rocks, geology and that sort of thing is having their own kind of will their own kind of intrinsic importance and from an activist standpoint we see this kind of philosophical approach unfold in the context of efforts to re-wild rivers re-bend rivers to take dams out and focus on wild and scenic, I know that you've mentioned a section, we have these little sections in rivers like this is the wild part everything else is not but that's how it all works which is its own kind of funny little contradiction and then of course on pollution and the benefit of other species or even not species at all so bearing all this in mind let's take a closer look at the watershed itself so as Rebecca and Epor both pointed out I think so well the question of rivers is fundamentally a question of intellectual history and the kinds of taxonomies that we use to divide up territory and space and I think going back to Christian's question earlier about the why of people who are interested in borders I think in some ways it represents the almost complete domination in our modern minds of political borders as the the only way of dividing up space but from a scientific point of view certainly from a purely river history point of view what we find is the natural but the real right boundary that exists is of the watershed of the catchment basin and you can see that here in the context of the United States and Mexico you can see the major Mexican tributaries you can see the major US tributaries and of course the river the main scam of the river doesn't make sense outside of thinking about the other contributors and this is especially the case in the context of Rio Grande which is where some sections of it run completely dry we just got some peg snapshots from Zoe which is just a real experience getting an iPhone photo from Zoe who's in West Texas right now showing us that the river there is now completely dry whereas in the bottom in the delta it's not and that of course has to do with the larger dynamics of the river so we see this in the context of six states four on the Mexican side of course the river doesn't care of course in most cases scientists don't care either and so that's beyond political border perspective is something that is baked into the scientific the scientific approach the approach of many scientists which I think is very interesting and also represents the cultural gap between disciplines as much as it does anything else but what I really want to point out here in the context of this map and then this satellite map here you can tell all of us rivers we love Google Earth and satellite maps it's endlessly useful for asking questions and demonstrating some of these concepts I want to point out and speak for a few minutes about the question of scale which I think is really important in an interesting aspect to this especially here in Europe where you're working on different kinds of scales often times and so I think that's interesting just in terms of context but I think it's interesting in terms of the larger intellectual implications of this kind of work so but here about that area about the size of Germany and the Rio Grande itself is longer than any river in western Europe it's about the length of Danube so it's really just absolutely way off the charts in terms of the land mass of western Europe importantly the map it moves between very very different ecosystems and that's what the slide here on the right is meant to show if you can just in your mind imagine kind of transpose this map to that map of the space in the same scale you can see that the headwaters of the Rio Grande start in very very high mountains about 4500 meters you might have altitude sickness, high altitude and then of course it drains of the Gulf of Mexico where it is subtropical climate palm trees, the whole nine yards I can't take it down there it's way too humid and too hot for me and then the main chunk of it which is passing through here is passing through a desert desert to likes of which doesn't exist in Europe and so we find it has different characteristics intrinsically but then ultimately we'll find it has different characteristics sociologically depending on where you are not just the watershed but where you even are on the main stem precisely because this is a river that is making a very significant journey not just over space but also it's tumbling downwards thousands of meters and from that point of view it is descending quite rapidly even though it's still long and that has implications for where we are in a given part of the watershed I think that something that hasn't been talked about thus far is something that I've become very very interested in and have had a lot of intellectual trouble with in recent months and probably will have for many years to come is scale not just in terms of space but scale in terms of time and if you really want to do river history take seriously the prospect of the river itself or the watershed itself more more accurately as the object of analysis you have to completely demolish a periodisation that is rooted in anything that resembles a human lifetime and you have to go back into geologic time and that is something that is very difficult to do cognitively it's not easy for a mind to grasp deep time it's not easy to do as a historian because unlike in the context of European archaeology where archaeology has a textual sidebar a textual component that goes back millennia who don't in North America text as we know it alphabetic systems don't really arrive until the 16th century when a human history goes back 20,000 years and so we have a very serious methodological problem in that sense and then you have a component of that which is the scientists they already have a language for all of this stuff and it's very impenetrable for people who have not been versed in the chibolettes of the jargon of what it all means and so what I've been struggling with as a historian is to figure out how to narrativize in a way that takes seriously the non human components but also doesn't just reproduce scientific language that I don't understand and that arguably doesn't matter in the context of trying to tell a deeper story and so I don't have a solution here I have only a set of problems but a set of problems that I find quite liberating to get out of to try to not be a human as much as I can to try to not fall into the set of assumptions that might be in the brain and that and that a world dominated today and by today I mean the last 200 years let's say by political territorialization has imposed upon me and so this is the realm of river history that I've been exploring the most deeply and the one that I'm most excited about but I think that the most common approach that we see is to focus on people and this we can contrast with the eco-centric approach with the obviously anthropocentric approach it worries me oftentimes it's the extent to which the anthropocentric approach is adopted as the only obvious approach as just a self-evident given for how one asks questions about the world this is again why I find the river self-history so interesting this kind of literature produced on human-centered approaches is far more visible I think reading public and to journalism compared to the scientific literature but don't forget there is this vast literature of scientific writing about rivers all over the world it's just less available and accessible to a lot of people so again there's this territorialization as it were between not just the disciplines but between the sciences and humanities which of course recently as the 19th century I didn't exist that kind of siloization of intellectual inquiry and so the two questions that we often find in the anthropocentric approach this is classic environmental history 101 what do people do to the natural world and what does the natural world do to people and a good example of this from the US-Mexico border is this place here which is right where the river becomes the border this is from the 1960s and what you're looking at here is El Paso, Texas on the left the United States to El Flates, Chihuahua Mexico on the right and then of course you can see the channel of the Rio Grande there this is important for several reasons and again the first presentations were so fascinating so the we operate on the legal doctrine of Thalawik so the deepest channel of the river is the border and so if the river moves so does the border terrible idea for a modern border to designate a river at all but certainly a desert river and this is where the ecosystem approach makes a difference because desert rivers more than humid land rivers tend to move more frequently we can talk about why if you're interested so the river moved in the 1860s 100 years of arbitration and litigation take place between the United States and Mexico until we get to the 1960s when you can see here on this photograph this yellow line actually stickers on the photograph itself designate where they were going to move the channel to so you can see this I feel like I shouldn't tell people which pictures are what upstairs but suffice it to say there are photographs of this place that Zoe took and the solution here was to completely encase it in trapezoidal concrete and discipline the river in a way that was commensurate with the necessities of 20th century borders that increasingly more and more had to be very, very fixed and very precisely delineated so when we look at the river from an anthropocentric lens it's important to recognize that we are almost always looking at just one part of the river so obviously the river is really long the river is really tributary etc but that doesn't matter in the context of localized in the context of local places and we saw this in the first two presentations as well it's not a bad thing it's a phenomenon of what the anthropocentric approach looks like and the tension between the river as a whole and the river as a particular site that causes some kind of influences somehow human behavior, human organization and then there is a focus on policy what kinds of policies have been super imposed upon a river or on a border and this of course is a variation on the theme of an anthropocentric approach because it's entirely within the context of human institutions even if it's on behalf of other species or on behalf of the non-living world and the focus on policy I find tends towards macroscopic scale so more and more especially since the 1990s in the United States and in Mexico when we talk about the border we're not really talking about the border at all we're talking about immigration policy as it pertains to the border and in that regard there is a macroscopic lens works and makes sense because it's a federal zone that has an evenly distributed instead of requirements and not an evenly distributed kind of enforcement but you get the idea this kind of history and again getting back to the question of time scale is a very short shallow chronology it's organized along the lines of when were the policies enacted when were the treaties enacted when were the statutes passed by congress about immigration when were the drug wars and so on and so forth and so there is a built-in assumption of scale that we find in all of these approaches that I try that one of the challenges I've issued myself and I try to issue to my students is to be more self-aware about the kinds of time scale assumptions in particular that were making when we start to ask these questions so this map here on the left is a good example of the policy map it's a map that exclusively focuses on the political borders of both the Mexican states and then the US Mexico border and as you can see here the river isn't even there even though of course that's all river and of course the river continues on upward into Colorado, into the high mountains and so when the river stops being the border people stop being interested in it from the point of view of policy analysis but as you can see from the image on the right the built environment is also read oftentimes as an expression of policy and I think rightly so and so what we're looking at here is actually not the river we're looking at an irrigation ditch a channelized irrigation ditch that has diverted water from the river and is moving it to an agricultural zone before I'm always interested in agricultural zones in borders and part of the the big mega project fence building that started in 2007-ish and has cost unknown billions of dollars and of course the fence here is a physical manifestation of policy but not local policy a policy that is really only meaningful to put it into the context of a national political sensibility that gave rise to a federal project to size and scope for the border fence to begin with and this is in contrast to what is a very local set of policies which is the irrigation ditch right there and Rebecca the buoy and the water is absolutely fascinating to me because even in the context of the tribe borders of Chihuahua, Mexico New Mexico and Texas, USA where you would think that the U.S. Mexico border could could not be better delineated there was an incident at the start of the last drug war in 2007 when Mexican president called their own sent troops to the northern border and they intentionally bring them from other parts of Mexico so they don't have local connections and they accidentally crossed the empty riverbed thinking the irrigation ditch was the river because that's what the water actually was all the water had been siphoned out for agricultural reasons then because the U.S. border patrol has a zero tolerance policy they were forced to arrest a bunch of Mexican soldiers which led to an absolute summit where they all met in the building in the seated land that you just saw in what we call the Tamsau to get everybody on the same page all these federal agencies on the Mexican side and the U.S. side where actually is the border and who's allowed to cross it and who isn't and in what context and so I want to close by using you to my limited solution to some of these problems that I worked on in my first book about the border and this came about based on an interest in what I think of as alternative cartography how we can use not just photography like April was talking about but also different ways of map making to represent these kinds of border spaces in a way that feels more real than me as a border person in North America and so I kept track as I was editing my book manuscript of every single place name that I mentioned and not just political place names but also deserts, mountains, physical infrastructure et cetera and I hired this brilliant map maker and I gave it to him and I said can you get all of this onto a single map and the answer was yes this is the map of the US Mexico border that I worked from in my book and he did a lot of brilliant things in this map including including different line weights on the river so you can actually see the difference in discharge in other words how much water is in different parts of the river so it gives you a much better sense of the actual working aspects of the much larger hydrological system but then also the way that interacts with policy development so often expressed through infrastructure projects and so when he showed me this and of course it's a physical map you can see the topography you can see the different deserts which matter for reasons that we can talk about and you can see that there are in fact a wide range of different kinds of environments through which this ostensibly legally unified border path is through and so when I saw this map I said that's the map I've always wanted that's the map that looks and feels the realest to me as a border person even in a very contested border zone like the US Mexico border but I'd also like to point out one thing in closing here and that is don't forget there's this whole western border too and as you can see in the map here it's largely it's a straight line and so the United States, Canada and Mexico in the 19th century broke the mold from a European perspective on kind of solving a lot of border problems in advance just taking a bearing and drawing a straight line and those borders are very easy to manage when they demarcated the Rio Grande as the international border in the 1840s they they were doing what people had been doing in Europe for millennia and that is using mountains and rivers as natural ways to divide to divide territory now anticipating the extent to which in the 20th century especially in the 21st century the degree of precision that would be expected of international divides would be completely transformed and that of rivers and most importantly a desert river is the worst choice you could possibly make for an international border and so don't forget that there's more border than just the river and there's more river than just the river border thank you so much for this wonderful talk I hope you're willing to take questions I'm sure I'm sure there are questions and I think we have about 10 minutes for questions so before we can go upstairs and have lunch and look at the pictures and I'll go and also look at the borderline project thank you CJ, that was really very interesting I didn't realize that the Rio Concho from Mexico actually contributes to the Rio Grande further down by Amistades damn but the United States also controls the elephant beaut that's why the water doesn't run through as much as it used to or at least last time I was there it's been raining a lot lately and I noticed that the river is pretty full even in today but what about the bolsones can you talk a little bit about the the other water underneath that El Paso has dependent upon and how do the countries conserve and utilize and share those resources yeah first of all the Rio Concho is a very important in fact the drought that we've had this summer there were just two campesinos like kind of field agricultural workers just killed in a protest by federal troops in Mexico recently protesting releases from the Boquilla Dam on the Rio Concho they didn't want more water to be released to the US side that the federal government of Mexico is releasing water to the US side alongside the operations at El Paso is because we have a treaty relationship with Mexico since 1906 that guarantees allegedly depending on rainfall and storage that each country gets a certain amount of water now the bolsones is a whole other black box there are now un at Texas A&M Rosario Sanchez who is mapped for the first time what we think are 44 subsoil cross border aquifers bear in mind that most of this is desert territory we have no treaty relationship with Mexico to manage the use of those waters in fact we just learned based on her white paper a few just where even those aquifers even were and so the subsoil dimension of that larger hydrological system that Rebecca introduces to is incredibly important not just in the context of bilateral relations but in the context of desert survival in high density settlements this is big cities in the desert in human history and I grew up my whole life there drinking ground water we don't use river water for human consumption and it's running low it's heavily salamated thank you so much for this very brilliant ways to think when you were talking about the fact that not to be human to think about hydrological times to talk about the river I was thinking even if you want to talk about us as human or human times you also have to have a kind of non human approach I was thinking for instance when something like Fukushima happens and that the result is going to be pertain for 100,000 years it's exactly the same thing so this kind of symmetry goes also toward thinking a future as well as the past biological times it's a kind of it's a kind of symmetrical approach that you can actually have between those two ways of thinking of ways of spending I think that's exactly right I think the question of bio accumulation of heavy metals in particular is astonishing in its scope and requires us to think not just from a multi-species point of view but from a deep future point of view I think the question of radioactivity like you point out is especially pertinent in this context because you have to remember the first atomic weapons in human history was detonated in the desert right near the borders in southern Mexico and it's still radioactive and in fact in the great base in the United States we detonated over 900 weapons so we basically during the cold war we nuked ourselves for decades and decades in a way that the Brits were able to do Australia, the French were able to do and Algeria, other deserts and so we have our own deserts which we destroy with nuclear weaponry and I think that's another way that I think about not just deep history but also deep future and also how I think about the broad context of the militarization of the border not just exclusively in the context of the securitization migrants in black markets and that sort of thing but also in the sense that both the Mexican army and the U.S. Army can do weapons there in terms of civil patrols and so on and so forth Thank you so much for your talk I was wondering in how far non anthropocentric approach of the real grand of really the only important space here, not any settler colonial borders would be in line with indigenous cosmological understandings of Turtle Island as being united. I'm asking because the Tejono Arthur Nation of the U.S. Mexican border does actually massively resist the construction of a border wall but also in a way assist the U.S. Mexican border police border patrol in terms of determining who is of their nation and has the right to cross this space as a tribal member though of course they do not do this in a way that would be comparable to some of the military violence that we have been seeing so once again what is possibly the connection of a non anthropocentric approach to indigenous cosmology Yeah, that is such an interesting question and one I think about a lot if you you can't understand indigenous history in northern Mexico and west United States without understanding river history they are one of the same precisely because it is a desert there are multiple deserts it is dry land and so in every culture Tejono automatically one of the kind of exceptions to that because they are like true desert people have built their settlements along rivers so if you go to the upper part of Rio Grande what you find is the oldest continuous occupied places in North America going back in the document record a thousand years which is a long time for us in North America but certainly vastly pre-dates that look colonialist in the region both by Mexico and by the Americas and they are still there and you can see where the cosmological question becomes really interesting is when you start to find very significant tension between the the widely agreed upon scientific consensus about the chronology of people crossing a land bridge from Eurasia and linguistic proliferation and differentiation eventually the settling of the Americas by by human beings from the same stock as we're all from originating millions of years ago in East Africa and in almost all indigenous cosmologies they don't tell that story they tell a story of we came typically from the ground and we know where there the specific site or at least a specific zone within the homeland and so and there's typically not much of an interest in nailing down the chronology and the way that there is in western epistemology and so to me there's two ways to approach this there's the way that a lot of people have which is to try to figure out who's right which I think is asking the wrong question I think there is the more challenging way and that is to develop narratives that hold indigenous cosmologies in parallel as it were with western cosmologies and recognizing that the western scientific method and our laboratory analysis and our carbon 14 dating and our gender chronology and all the other methods that we have in age meaning are also cultural systems and from that point of view you don't need you don't need an answer you just you just because they're both right in that regard we can talk more in detail if you want about the specific tribes but it's a very good and complex question ok, alright well thank you so much we'll find time to talk about all of these things over lunch but I think this was a wonderful I'm kind of like wow how this all worked out together thank you very much lunch at the distance student projects and then we're back for our second session and hand over to my colleague so thank you very much, enjoy lunch