Performative conversation
With Myriel Milicevic, Maud Canisius, Thiago da Costa Oliveira and Xenia Chiaramonte

A multitude of habitats, a source of energy, water and life, an economic backbone, a plurality of communities of people and other species, a route of propagation, a contested line, a landscape of politics, a place of spirits and lore, a connection through time and cultures… a personhood. There are uncountable ways to look at a river. However, many of them remain invisible in today’s cartographic depictions.

In reference to Umberto Eco’s “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, we took on the challenge to draw a map of the river Danube in the Lido area of Bratislava. The Lido area bears conflicting interests between urban developers and river communities, which are typical on these terrains. How does the way different actors look at a place influence what is represented? How do different rights to and of the river relate to each other?

Having spent four days with this small section of Europe’s second largest river, exploring with humans and through the eyes of nonhumans possible river relationships, we formulated a set of steps, or exercises, for analysing the impossibility of mapping the river.

This conversation on visual as well as legal representation of a river is now continued by Maud Canisius and Myriel Milicevic, together with anthropologist and photographer Thiago da Costa Oliveira and with jurist and socio-legal scholar Xenia Chiaramonte, and the river Danube itself in a “live stream”.