As meandering sources of life and arteries of the earth, rivers bridge land and water, and are crucial for life to flourish. Yet so many rivers have become wretched waters: sites of extensive mining waste, hydroextraction, oil refineries, pulp mills, radiation poisoning, and other irreversible environmental disasters. Over the last one hundred years, the Mississippi has amassed its own particular history that can be roughly sketched as a site that has gone from plantations to petrochemicals, with a stretch famously dubbed as “cancer alley” for the exponentially high rates of cancer in local communities. Rivers are fractal connectors, tying together entire continents, civilizations past and present, human with nonhuman, sediment with atoms. They’re a rich site to explore the far-reaching effects of climate change.

Entering these worlds has been my main collaborative research focus for the last five years, using experimental film methods to attune to these nonhuman stories. In my particular filmmaking approach and methods, I think critically through a type of embodied sensorial practice that focuses on encounters between humans and nonhumans. In doing so, I ask: what possibilities emerge for taking on complex space-time assemblages in the Mississippi that connect indigenous lifeworlds, colonialism, slavery, waterscapes, chemical legacies, invisible harm, and other long-lasting effects of various disasters? Every scene in The Mississippi Multiverse carries a multispecies narrative: whether it be the watery invasive water hyacinth fields, or the boat radio captain’s reading of the riverscape, or the procession of ants carrying foam from the water—right across from the DOW chemical plant.

Sound design by Andres Camacho