Undead River - On the Inoperativity of Water

2025 - ongoing

Szigetköz, Hungary

video; writing

Presented at 'Conflict Rivers', Utrecht University
Supported by Arts Council UK, and Akademia Schloss Solitude

As the Old Danube entered and spread across the plain of Pannonia, the river split into thousands of branches depositing sediment that formed the vast inland delta we call Szigetköz. It is a relic from a time when the river was still free to run unregulated between scattered groves and islands, burying and creating land along its way. The unmappability and unpredictability of the maze-like branches once provided safe refuge for those deemed ungovernable and undesirable by the state.

This project takes the concept of 'inoperativity' to formulate an approach for engaging with peripheral wet environments. Inoperativity is the radical suspension of potentiality, as understood by Agamben. It is a proposition for the subversion of established relations between means and ends, opening it up to new possible use. Through this project, I turn my critical attention to an inoperative environment that refuses to be neatly folded into capitalist modes of production, and which has been able to avoid financialization, at least in part.

This stagnant water has lost its hydraulic functionality. It has become unnavigable, unirrigable, and uneconomizable. It escapes the logics of enclosure and productivity, and also defies nationalist spatial imaginaries through interstitiality and biological disorder.

The zone of transition outlines a space where water and land continuously renegotiate their relations. The desiccated waters of Szigetköz remain inoperative only insofar as they are also transitional. This zone is a space where ecological and political processes overlap without resolution.