TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024
a watery experiment in transdisciplinary environmental storytelling
By Ally Bisshop & Zeynep Akcay
Hydrofictions is a research project initiated by Ally Bisshop and Zeynep Akcay in November 2023. It began as an idea, which gathered momentum and volume as it travelled along a river in a boat, and gently precipitated in conversations, drawings, music, a book – and now, a sonic-essay, to which you are invited to listen. This sonic essay gathers the traces of that starting event: an interdisciplinary experiment in environmental storytelling, which sought to harness the unique sensory and spatial displacements offered by a boat trip on the Brisbane River [Maiwar]. On this journey, creative practitioners and scientists from Griffith University’s Creative Arts Research Institute, Climate Action Beacon and Australian Rivers Institute came together to explore radical possibilities for situated storytelling about and within Brisbane’s riverine and wetlands ecosystems. These experiments drifted from river listening to mark-making and observational exercises – feeding into conversations about storytelling from different disciplinary perspectives, and how we might come together to tell more impactful stories about climate futures. This event was an exercise in thinking about how we might meet in the middle; how we might work together to tell compelling stories about place, how we might find a way to make sense of the world around us, but also to make sense to each other – across our different disciplines and ways of knowing and making.
HYDROFICTIONS BOOK (Presentation) by Ally Bisshop and Zeynep Akcay
In late 2023, we began planning a boat trip along the Brisbane River [Maiwar][1], as a way to bring together researchers from scientific and diverse creative and performing arts backgrounds in an experiment in collective and in-situ environmental storytelling. As we began planning this event, it became clear that we each had different ideas about what constitutes a story. The hydrofictions experiment thus became, in part, an interrogation of what storytelling meant to the different people gathered on this boat – across disciplines (ecology, animation, music, visual arts, film), across personal histories, across cultures and practices of knowing.
We began with an understanding of stories as essentially sensemaking exercises. Stories are, first and foremost, ways of making sense of the world – its complexities, its rhythms and interdependencies, its collective histories, presents and futures. Stories are also ways of making sense to each other – of sharing and transmitting experience, knowledge. Stories are informed by our sensory grasp of the world, and attempt to harness that same affective sensory power in the telling. Given their beginnings in an empirical grasp of the world – that slice of the world we are able to sensorially apprehend – we understand stories as things that can only ever present situated and partial (embodied and embedded) worldviews (Haraway 1988: 581). A story builds a picture of the world, and the relations that this world renders possible. In this way, a story about the world is true to the teller, but not necessarily true or sensible for all who read, hear, touch, smell or see it.
How then, through exercises in transdisciplinary storytelling, might we make a collective kind of sense? How might our sensorial grasp of this river – parsed through our disciplinary and cultural frames of knowing and meaning-making – be translated, rendered sensible to others? How might varying formulations of story come together in ways that allow us to better understand one another; to tell stories that fold together scientific fact, the affective sense of being in place, and the creative force of imagination?
If we had a more-or-less pragmatic goal – to find ways of making sense to one another – we nonetheless understood this exercise as a speculative one: as the building of a kind of fiction.
Where a fiction can be read as a fable – a conjured story, untethered from fact – we think of fiction in its speculative, expansive and provocative registers: as a flexing of the imagination, which is nonetheless grounded in the real (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 1). Fiction is a verb: it cracks open the present in order to locate within it the possibilities for being and imagining otherwise. As a creative rupturing of the real to invent something new, fiction is an exercise in asking: what if…? What if we were to imagine things this way, rather than that way?
Situating hydrofictions: what kind of story is this river?
Stories are immersive: they render possible and habitable worlds, just as they are informed by the real worlds that we inhabit. As environmental storytellers from diverse backgrounds, our interest in this event was in telling situated stories: stories that respond to – are specific to – a given place. Storytelling from somewhere, rather than nowhere in particular. Telling situated stories demands a kind of immersive intimacy with place; it asks of us to spend time, to sensorially attend to the particular stories that a site holds. This was the starting provocation of the boat trip itself – to find new possibilities for sensory relation to the ’somewhere’ of the Brisbane River [Maiwar], and all the possibilities for living and being this river supports.
In priming participants for the event, we invited them to consider the question: what kind of story is this river? As a partial address to this question, we designed various exercises in sensing and attuning with this landscape. In one ‘river listening’ exercise, musicians improvised in response to real-time underwater soundscapes gleaned from hydrophones dropped over the edge of the boat, their musical performance simultaneously translated into a dynamic drawing that unfolded on the boat’s floor. These exercises also included provocations to consider the river from different disciplinary perspectives – including ecological storytelling about the past and projected future of this ecosystem in warming climates, and textual provocations from theorists and philosophers across the arts, environmental and post– humanities, and beyond.
These provocations became a practice of reciprocal entangling. As we moved through different disciplinary stories about the Brisbane River – the ecosystems that the river sustains, and that sustain it in turn – we became active parts of this active ecosystem of exchange, giving rise to a kind of situated storytelling from within. But; what does it mean to sense from an already entangled embodiment? How can such a story make sense?
Fictions and frictions: crosscurrents, undercurrents and eddies
Our event explored possibilities for sensory displacements and entanglements on and under the water of the Brisbane River. These experiments addressed that other aspect of situated storytelling: stories not only embedded in site, but embodied – reflecting the corporeal, cultural, sensorial and disciplinary habits of the bodies of its storytellers. As a diverse group, we inhabited different bodily postures of knowing and creating – that drifted between ecology and climate science, animation and music, drawing and sculpture to film. How, then, might our different sensory stories of the river be translated, transmitted or shared in meaningful ways?
In our experimentation, we understood the river itself as presenting an interesting material and epistemological model. This site was not a fixed entity, but a dynamic flux of uneven movements and speeds: sometimes rushing violently downstream, sometimes pooling and catching in eddies, sometimes slowing and thickening in brackish puddles. The river mixes and swirls things together. It also changes the speed, tone and possibilities of other relations – like sound, which travels faster underwater, but is felt and sensed differently.
As an experiment in transdisciplinary co-creation – and in making collective sense across different disciplinary and sensory bodyings – we took our cues from the river itself. We paid attention to the ways in which the river bodies itself: the shape of its movements, the entanglements that enliven this ecosystem, its rhythms and temporalities, the histories and beginnings that swell and fade in and through this watery body. We tried to imagine co-creation practices that, like the river, bled across boundaries: moving across and through different disciplinary perspectives and methods, and between different bodies and ways of being in the world – human or nonhuman, living or nonliving. Our experiment was not about tending to the things that separated us, but about feeling into the knots of relation: the edges and spaces where our bodies, desires, and ways of thinking and being were entangled.
Attending to the river gave us a visceral sense of the collisions and collapses that animate this river body; a body not singular nor stable, but plural, dynamic. A body nonetheless made lively through its displacements and frictions – the eddies, undercurrents, crosscurrents that scissored its surface, and trembled its corpus. We came to understand our coming together – the convergence of disciplinary practices that we brought together on this boat – in a similar fashion.
Like the topos of the river, the story that emerged from our event was not smooth, but striated with different knowledges, practices and intentions. Our sonic essay, then, is not a smooth re-telling, but a story glimpsed in fragments, a story that moves at varying volumes and speeds, a story told in different voices, drifting between harmony and discord. However, this friction was not hostile to our storytelling process, but generative: like the ripples that form when two currents meet, and which change each other’s paths and form in the process. As we move forward, we wonder: if river stories “run interference” (Manning and Massumi 2014: 1), how are we also changed when we meet each other across disciplinary, cultural, or other thresholds? How are our stories changed?
Acknowledgments:
This research project was generously supported by Griffith University’s Creative Arts Research Institute (CARI), Climate Action Beacon and Griffith Film School. We thank all participants of the Hydrofictions event, and whose writings contributed to the book and sonic essay we assembled from it. Thanks to Vanessa Tomlinson, Jodie Rottle, Yoel Hill, Briony Barr, Mat Klotz, Trish Fitzsimmons, Brian Fry, Annique Goldenberg, Merete Megarrity, Caro Manins, Katie Turlington, and Liz Shaw.
The Hydrofictions event and resulting research unfolded on the unceded and sovereign lands of the Turrbal and Jagera (Yuggera) people. We pay respect to Elders past and present, and acknowledge their ongoing care and custodianship of these lands.
References:
Burrows, D. and S. O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Haraway, D. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Manning, E. and B. Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
[1] The Traditional Custodians of Brisbane and its surrounds are the Turrbal and Jagera (Yuggera) people. Maiwar is a Turrbal name for the Brisbane River.
Dr. Ally Bisshop is a creative researcher exploring interdisciplinary and speculative approaches to environmental knowledge making. Her practice, teaching, and writing combines concepts and methods from arts and science to explore sensory, material, and ethical entanglements within more-than-human worlds. Her research contributes to emergent fields of inquiry at the intersection of the environmental and post-humanities, multispecies studies, and creative practice – often employing ‘fictioning’ methods to envision alternative futures and possibilities for relation. She is Lecturer, Interdisciplinary STEM in Creative Arts at Griffith Film School, Griffith University Brisbane.
Dr. Zeynep Akcay is an animation filmmaker and scholar. She grew up in the Metropolitan and Mediterranean cities of Turkey, and lived in Montreal, Canada for long years. She has recently discovered the subtropical wetlands of Brisbane and is struck by the resilience and beauty of this unique ecology. She is currently working on a VR time-lapse film showing the life cycle of a Mangrove tree. Her work seeks to expand the traditional frontiers and narratives of animation while engaging in themes centering around gender, ecology, displacements and audience interaction. She is currently leading the Animating major of the Animation Program at Griffith Film School.