Fluvial Infrastructures, Embodied Evidence, and The Limits of Sensory Governance

The majority of England’s rivers are widely evidenced as toxic and harmful to health. The most recent ‘State of our Rivers’ report by The Rivers Trust (2024) found that no river or stretch of water in England can be categorised as in ‘good’ status. Whilst reports of slushy-coloured water and green algal blooms pervade descriptions of these spaces, concern equally remains over what cannot be seen or sensed. Weaving together theoretical strands of sensori-legal studies and urban geography this paper aims to contribute to literature which has sought to disentangle the often- paradoxical relations between law and the senses (Hamilton et al, 2016). Drawing upon the analysis of community campaigns, citizen science projects, legal cases, alongside semi-structured, mobile and audio interviews with various stakeholders, this paper explores the interconnectedness of embodied evidence and the legal regulation of urban waterways across London. Exploring the challenges local communities and activists face with (i) experiencing, (ii) recording and (iii) translating multi-sensory knowledge of polluted rivers into forms of evidence deemed legible by the justice system, it begins to call attention to what remains absent from these cases. Ultimately, it hopes to continue to shed light on what attending to the multi-sensory reveals about the search for justice, clean water, and healthy waterways. In doing so, this paper offers a small insight into how sensuous assumptions enable certain forms of fluvial governance, and are embedded within the legal process, more broadly. Put simply, this research aims to centre the question of how law senses.

Keywords: Odour, rivers, urban, evidence, campaigns
 

Natalie Doonan ∆ (Communication, Université de Montréal, Canada)

How Is Immersive: Environmental Accountability for Public Performance in Canada

This paper asks how to ethically meet the increasing demand on artists within Canadian artistic and scholarly institutions to produce outcomes with national and international impact. It employs sensory immersion as a guiding theme for addressing the issue of ethical accountability toward the plants, animals, insects, and elements of our shared world through public art. Immersion in this sense implies both the idea of plunging into a world, and a more-than-only-human understanding of its social contours. The socio-ecological role of publicly-funded art is imposing itself with increasing urgency in the context of planetary crisis. This is an opportunity for artists to create and promote work that positions issues of biodiversity at the center of studies in Canadian art and visual culture. Focusing on VerdunReality: Riparian Play, a multimedia performance presented in Montreal in the summer of 2023, I show the importance of site-specific, participatory performance as one possible example of how to model practices of care for the environment and for others within current research-creation paradigms.
Keywords: Immersion, Participatory performance, Multimedia performance, Virtual Reality, Place- based art

Alessandro Livraghi (LéaV- ENSA Versailles + CY Cergy Paris Université EUR PSGS-HCH, France)
FABRIQUER UN CORPS. Pour une nouvelle cosmologie chimérique et un atomisme des relations dans le paysage fluide du Bassin Parisien

The river forces us to confront spatio-temporal paradoxes that subvert any current ontological conception of the territory. The landscape becomes immersive, we ‘bathe’ into it. This new attribute leads to a radical reversal, redefining the very categories of thought and action: it's a question of synchronisation. The terrain for this reasoning is the Parisian Basin, a telluric bioregion that still lacks a body. The research encourage a transformation that leads us to consider this place and the Seine not as Resources, but as Living Sources. It's a real ‘Copernican revolution’: we need to re-construct the way we look at form by questioning the ontological substance of space. Dwelling is no longer a protective envelope, but extends to the relational fabric of an affective geography, in which nature and culture intermingle in a fluid environment in constant metamorphosis. The red thread is structured around a personal ethnographic experience that saw the author cycle the entire Seine, over 850 km, from Le Havre to Dijon. Thanks to perceptive deceleration devices, the author's body has been encouraged to adhere to the rhythms of the Seine, rediscovering the processes of spatial semiosis.

Keywords: Chimerical Cosmology, Ecological transition, Epistemological redefinition, Fabricate a Living Body