The All Rivers and Species Act
A collaborative world and policy building project
Can we develop new, collective ways of listening to or sensing rivers? These workshops explore the possibilities of listening-with rivers and water bodies through collaborative worlding methodologies.
TARASA is a research project focusing on the rights and voices of rivers worldwide. The artists respond to the recent granting of legal personhood rights to a river and a mountain in New Zealand and elsewhere. The project was born during FIBER Festival’s virtual Weaving With Worlds lab in the summer of 2021.
The collective have run a number of public collective river understanding and co-worldbuilding workshops. ‘The Rivers Journey: a guided river interaction’ was held at FIBER Festival 28 + 30 October 2021, and another held at The Holland Festival in June 2022. During this workshop, the public is invited to explore and amplify the 'voice' of water through deep listening, walking and co-making methods.
This multifaceted blueprint is a collaboration between Cristina Napoleone, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Nayeli Vega, Jemma Woolmore, Jenny Handley & Lily McCraith. The collective uses the name TARASA - The All Rivers and Species Act. The group considered stories of person-hood; the many global perspectives on the non-human; the lives and rights of water. With a particular interest in technology, TARASA collaborated with machine learning AI-tool GTP2, to generate a fictional legal text (read here), which was instructed by various models interacting with each other.
The group channelled the voice of the act through a specific creature, in a visualised organic woven combination of River life. Drawing from images of waterways around the world, several soundscapes were extracted as imagined by AI machine Imaginary Soundscape. These soundscapes are combined with actual aural interactions from Rivers the members could connect with near their homes across the world.
https://www.hollandfestival.nl/en/workshop-the-all-rivers-and-species-act
