Landscapes of Refusal

2024 - ongoing

Sulina, Romania

photography; video; writing

Supported by Clean Waters Artistic Research Residency;
and Akademie Schloss Solitude

As the Danube was coerced into a specific type of motion useful for the logics of accumulation, disobedient wet environments began to disappear. I am interested in studying what remains, dead branches, mortlakes, wetlands and other stagnant waters that do not neatly fit into productive categorisations like wet and dry, or dead and alive. The delta is perhaps the most spectacular example of ‘inoperativity’ along the Danube – a concept that I have been developing at other watery ‘zones of transition’ in Eastern Europe. I want to position these stagnant waters that escape financialization against narratives of extraction, domination, and circulation. Can we find the capacity for resistance in these stubbornly disobedient landscapes of disruption?

Through a continued engagement with Sulina and its residents, I am working on recovering Eastern European ways of knowing that come from inhabiting environments along the Danube and its basin. I’m specifically interested in collecting stories of resistance against the forces of financialization, as they emerge through food practices, the materiality of the wetland, or everyday acts of refusal.