The Arts of Streaming Central Asian River Life

How can environmental art and ethnographic research intervene in scaling projects, such as imaginaries of statehood and transnational river realities? Based on the paired notion of active stream-beds and transferring data over a network, I discuss the reformulation of water scales through art - as acts of streaming. To explore the impact of such new river understandings on broader publics, the chapter draws on the experience of a team ethnographic study and exhibition on 3000 kilometres of river in Central Asia. The Syr Darya river is a significant feeder of the now divided and shrunken Aral Sea. Its water allocation has been a central source of conflict between upriver and downriver republics, opposing key interests in hydropower and irrigation.
Habitual institutional scales of river problem analysis and management are not suited to address a wide range of river affordances and risks, such as pollution. In setting out to open up the reductionist river story, researchers chose arts-based methods as a relatively safe form of public critique, and as a space to engage with alternative river imaginaries. We used transdisciplinary research modes like a traveling exhibition as a first step to unlocking this regional impasse.
The argument for re-scaling rivers by streaming art focuses on three exhibition artifacts: a series of urban collages highlighting gendered risks in interactions with the river, an installation celebrating the sustainable use of reeds in the Syr Darya delta, and an illustrated children’s story personifying the river. I argue that these co-productions between researchers, river residents and artists concretely highlight the potential for the scaling of research design and artistic formats to open up spaces for alternative river-thinking, including institutional water infrastructures and governance.