The cultural heritage of water: reconnecting with rivers through art

euronews (in English)

As the European Pavilion 2024 floating arts programme prepares to head for Lisbon after sailing across four of the continent's largest rivers, Water Matters looks at examples of floating cultural projects aimed at reconnecting citizens with rivers.

Transcript

00:00We're opening up a third space. We're going to meet people where they are, sharing what

00:07we have, which is our artistic practice, and listening to what their hopes and stories

00:13and dreams might be from the future. We realised that the only way to do that was to sail on

00:18rivers.

00:20Dozens of international artists are sailing on four iconic rivers, on boats.

00:25They will join Lisbon on 7 November. It's the 2024 European Pavilion, Liquid Becomings.

00:33An opportunity to get interested in the artistic potential of watercourses in search of resilience.

00:38Heading to the Danube, where another event is taking place.

00:41How can art be made to live on water? Can rivers be spaces for liquid, itinerant, inclusive

00:49cultures? A festival is taking place here in Budapest, and we're going to see that with them.

01:01Charlyne and Nicolas imagined Fluctuation, the first river festival to have an impact

01:05in Europe. Their peninsula has taken a step forward in several cities.

01:09We take on board artists and activists, we sail for a whole week, we arrive in the

01:13next city, and the next weekend we redeploy this festival in the next city, and so on.

01:19But the Hungarian state had to be rethought. A Danube creek is expected. A reminder that

01:24rivers are fragile spaces to protect.

01:27So this is where we repatriated Fluctuation.

01:31And now we're going to conferences and roundtables.

01:35So here we're getting closer to the Village of Solutions.

01:39They are so engaged.

01:41What we really want to highlight is the mixed use of rivers.

01:44It's their poetic use, their festive use, but we can also talk about ecological potential

01:49and inclusive and social potential.

01:55We met Thomas, an activist for river art in Berlin.

01:59He conducted a study on the cultural boats of Europe, a kind of manual of liquid culture.

02:04Everybody that I know that does stuff on the water, they care a lot about the river.

02:09They organize river clean-up. When you actually do something on or with the river,

02:14you make mistakes, but you learn a lot.

02:17Somehow we need to find ways that people actually have a common interest with the river

02:22and then take care of it.

02:24A thought shared by the association Valio, a partner of the festival,

02:27which strives to make the Danube a more accessible, cyclable and clean river.

02:34Because of climate change, it's very important that we can get into these rivers

02:39and that they are so clean that we can go in and take a bath in them,

02:43just like it happened in Paris.

02:45And in Budapest, the water is much better and there is much more space for us to use it.

02:53This is the end of Water Matters. Take care of your rivers and see you soon.

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