This episode explores bodies of water as sites for the coalescence of time and place, where mythology, cultural and ecological narratives, citizenship, belonging, and familial legacies, can be traced and archived.

Zahra Malkani reads her text and plays accompanying field recordings that thread together other segments throughout the episode. Dilip da Cuhna talks about The Invention of Rivers in a lecture from 2019 at Harvard GSD. Architect Ola Hassanain and curator Michelle Mlati listen and respond to an oral excerpt of a performance by Ola at The Rijksakademie in The Netherlands last year as part of her project Tell the waters what the clay kept secret. In this performance, she recites a prayer towards water as a reparative act to the ecological emptying witnessed in Gezira, Sudan. Ola and Michelle discuss the role of the “Watcher” that has been entangled with Sufism and other ways of watching liminal waters. Arjuna Neuman presents part of the radio show For Lula, Mississippi, unearthing the ecological unconsciousness, from early blues to Choctaw music and culture, to contemporary pop. He connects Charlie Patton’s High Water Everywhere that describes the great flood of the Mississippi to Beyonce’s Formation. Priyageetha Dia presents the soundscape of her animation work, The Sea is A Blue Memory, and architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier reads an essay she wrote about her research on Aguas curativas (healing waters) in Northwestern Spain. Lastly, we pay tribute to the late Bill Viola with The Reflecting Pool, 1977–1979.

SOUND AND VIDEO CREDITS

Harvard GSD (2019)Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Dilip Da Cunha, “The Invention of Rivers” [Film, excerpt]

Dia, Priyageetha (2022) The Sea is a Blue Memory [Audio Files]Viola, Bill (1977-1979) The Reflecting Pool[Film]