Brackish Practices: Social Organisation in the Scheldt Estuary

Brackish Practices starts from the Scheldt estuary: a tidal landscape where fresh and salt water meet and where the boundary between land and water is constantly shifting. The estuary is an important habitat for plants, fish, birds, and micro-organisms, but also a place where many people live and work and where economic, ecological, and political interests intersect. Due to sea-level rise and climate change, this landscape is under increasing pressure. 
I explore how we might learn to live with the estuary differently. I start from the idea that care for this territory does not arise solely through policy or technical knowledge, but also through embodied experience. For this 
reason I work with situated fieldwork. I enter the estuary to learn from what happens on site in collaboration with scientists and other stakeholders. 
Based on this fieldwork, I develop Scheldt Assemblies: public forms of social organization in which residents, researchers, policymakers, and artists come together. These Assemblies center on collectively experiencing 
the estuary and create space to reimagine relationships between stakeholders. I develop wearable 
accessories that make insights from fieldwork physically tangible and open up ways to engage with more than-human perspectives. 
The research results in excursions, Scheldt Assemblies, and a publication, and aims to contribute to new ways of living with water.