rīvus

Rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems feature in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), titled rīvus, as dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency. Rivers are the sediment of culture. They are givers of life, routes of communication and places of ritual, but also sewers and mass graves. They are witnesses and archives, our memory. They have also been co-opted as natural avenues for the colonial enterprise, becoming sites of violent conflict driven by greed, exploitation and the thirst to possess. Indeed, the Latin root rīvus, meaning a brook or stream, is also at the origin of the word ‘rivalry’. 

Indigenous knowledges have long understood non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be protected. But only recently have animals, plants, mountains and bodies of water been granted legal personhood. If we could recognise them as individual beings, what might they say?

rīvus, presented at National Art School (NAS) in partnership with Artspace, is imagined as a subterranean river once buried that now resurfaces. Across three buildings participants explore displacement, erasure, impeded flows and stagnant waters. They guide us through submarine universes, both real and imagined. Language, song and storytelling are used to connect to the spirits of the land and waters. Marks made by the body call forth watery beings from the past and the future. On this fraught site, the deep well of history can no longer be contained and the desire for healing and reclamation are brought to the fore.