Flowing Streams was a multi-residency project supported by EUNIC Romania and curated by Adelina Luft.
It took place in different rural spaces across Romania throughout the summer of 2024 and involved seven residents selected through an open call, each hosted by a local organisation in proximity to different bodies of water: unique mineral water springs, the largest natural lake and salt-lake in the country, the second largest river in Europe, as well as small but crucial mountain rivers, streams, and water springs. The call gathered roughly 170 applications from which seven were selected: Harun Morrison at In Context Slănic Moldova, Václav Šana at The Experimental Station for Research on Art and life, Magdalena Siemaszko at Eforie Colorat, waterybeings (Nele Brökelmann and June Yu) at Watermelon Residency, Oroslya Gál at Intersecția, Joanna von Essen at TERRRA – The School of Planetary Garden and Alice Pontiggia at CUCA (Cârțișoara Cultural Center).

In the last decades the rising temperatures have caused the cascading effects of flooding, droughts, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination and ocean acidification. We are in very deep water, yet not in a literal sense. While there are a plethora of social and governmental endeavours struggling to protect, expand, adapt or maintain hydrological ecosystems, one approach is the reevaluation of people’s relationship with water-as-commons in order to repair hegemonic perceptions that water is a given or an endless resource for extraction and commodification. To give a reminder of what Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis wrote in the book Thinking with Water, “all is not well with the waters of the world – nor with the social relations mediated by their flows.” Water is what people make of it.

Adelina Luft, curator of Flowing Streams

In their short visits, the residents took the role of cartographers to map out the social and cultural imbalances affecting water relations, apart from the immediate reality of the brutal dryness. Apart from these initial mappings made during their short stays, the residents contributed with propositions, approaches, views and interventions that opened up a pool of resources to think further with.

Some examples were from reclaiming vernacular systems of collecting rainwater, imagining the environmental, cultural and social components for the health of the subterranean water of Cârțișoara or the privatised lake in Snagov to creating human-nature choreographies of reconnecting with the water, or drafting maps and games that continue to develop as works in relation to contexts elsewhere. Each brochure in this publication is a first-person account of the resident’s field notes, alongside a selection of images and a short description of the host organisation where the residencies took place. They represent a collective exercise of testing the waters of the human-aquatic relationships and of opening up crucial conversations on a local and trans-local level.

The Flowing Streams multi-residency project facilitated an exercise to create a bridge between artistic propositions and the rural world, between European practitioners and local organisations and between existing hydrological conditions and future possibilities of restoring human-water relations. Multiple operators, voices, approaches and practices came together under the project’s umbrella, a linguistic paradox in a year when rain has stopped falling — to add nuanced layers to an important conversation we alone cannot have.

Adelina Luft, curator of Flowing Streams

The publication

The result of the project consisted in a publication coordinated together with Nicoleta Moise and with designers Karolina Pietrzyk & Tobias Wenig. The publication gathers the research of all seven residents from a first-person account, alongside images and information on the host organisation, an introductory text by the curator and a reflective text from Rucsandra Pop, a Romanian anthropologist and writer. The publication has 500 copies which were distributed at two launching events, in Timișoara and Bucharest.

Waters of in-betweeness

The project expanded with a larger iteration in Timișoara, the cultural capital of Europe. Entitled Waters of in-betweeness, the exhibition in Timișoara held during 17 October and 11 November 2024 at HEI (House of European Institutes) gathered four local projects on the theme of water.

Along Flowing Streams, the EUNIC cluster invited Smart River Cluster by Cârțișoara Cultural Center, On rains, rivers, streams... by Alina Ușurelu, Georgiana Vlahbei, Lala Misosniky, Rucsandra Pop (RO), and AfterLand by Floriama Cândea (RO). The artistic initiatives in this exhibition have been formulated departing from acknowledging common issues and situations experienced in relation to an organism that is alive and continuously transforming – water. These are concerned with natural imbalances, loss of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and the ways in which water-as-common-resource has been enclosed, impounded and alienated from people. Using artistic, anthropologic, technical and scientific methodologies in researching different bodies of water located across Romania, the projects sought to map out and formulate new cartographies aimed at creating, through various collaborations and on the long run, a solid basis for reestablishing sustainable, fair and culturally specific relations between people and different hydrological contexts.

Ideally, artistic intervention in the community not only makes local people question realities that are very familiar to them but also empowers them to dream of a better home and take action to build that home together. Through this summer's residencies, the Flowing Streams project has laid the groundwork for an ecosystem of collaboration that will likely bring about change in the practice of both the artists and researchers involved and the people and organisations that hosted them.

Rucsandra Pop, anthropologist

The Flowing Streams publication may be accessed via this link.