Workshop of the Flood Risk Management Conference
This workshop intorduced rivers from the viewpoint of a river to shift thinking away from human centred needs and to take a stance of living with, rather than living from.
An example of such a way of thinking is recent legislation that was passed by the New Zealand parliament that declares that the Whanganui River and all its physical and metaphysical elements—is an indivisible, living whole, and henceforth possesses “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of a legal person.
Human rights were given to the river, because this was the closest existing form of law that could describe how the Maori people living in the Whanganui catchment understood their river. The people of the Whanganui have a saying, “the great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River, the River is me.” They say that the river is their “awa tupua”- their river of sacred power and a “tupuna”, an ancestor.
The aim of this workshop is not to follow the footsteps of the New Zealand Government by suggesting giving rights to rivers in Scotland, but what we aim to do today is take a different, more embodied, perhaps, view of the rivers in Scotland, or the rivers that are your rivers. The purpose for the next 70 minutes is to shift our thinking away from our human centred needs and try to ‘become’ the river, so to speak! By shifting our way of thinking, and attempting to move out of the box, we are aiming as a group to co-create a sense of a a different relationship to a river. I’ll be suggesting in the course of the workshop that we create two important concepts that might signal such a different relationship, and maybe lead us to make subtle shifts in the way we want to live with rivers. The premise for the workshop is that art based creative practice can help us to begin this journey, and we will be using creative processes such as poetry, drawing and free word association.
The Creative Practice Process
First, we are going to start with a film of a river’s journey. The film is approximately 10 minutes long. I will stop the film three times, each time you will write a group poem and then we are going to shift to drawing and creating our two new concepts of living with rivers.
On each table you have folded pieces of paper with a number 1, another 2 and another with 3. These are the papers you will write your group poetry on. We will start with the number 1. After playing three minutes of the film, one person will write a first line of the poem in top line. From the line they have written they will choose a keyword and write this on the right-hand side of the paper in line 2. You will then fold the piece of paper so no one sees what you have written, the next person then has to start their line or use the keyword somewhere in their line of poetry. What you write as poetry is to relate to what you see and hear in the film, which might also evoke emotions, memories, thoughts, and ideas.
Once you have written your poetry, we will share the poetry from each table and discuss some of the meanings of these poems and how this relates to your work in Flood Risk Management. After discussing the poetry and flood risk managment, you will be asked to draw, write words or put marks on paper whatever comes to mind when you think of the film, the poetry outcomes and the discussion we have had about how this relates to your work in Flood Risk Management. Finally you will be asked to place your creative piece on the river sketch that is on the floor in the middle of the room.
