Co-design with water: Boundless

Our fourth workshop took place on the 1-2 of October at/on/in the River Torridge. We worked with artist Antony Lyons and members from the North Devon Biosphere Reserve and the Devon Wildlife Trust  to explore whether the recent Connected Communities-funded Ethical Guidelines for Community-Based Participatory Research might be extended to working with non-humans, specifically water. This is the third in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Clara Mancini.

Reflecting on the experience of this workshop makes me think of Leonardo da Vinci. To me he represents the perfect synthesis between the artist and the scientist, who like no other could at the same time creatively intuit and rigorously study what Donna Haraway would call nature’s material semiotics. Leonardo’s boundless intellect and empathy allowed him to grasp things about nature that the world would take hundreds of years to catch up on. What I have learnt about Leonardo’s attitude towards nature seems relevant here: perhaps the reason we struggle with the idea that water (or trees, or bees or dogs) have agency and can participate in research is because our thinking is bound by all we have learnt about what agency and participation are supposed to be, and by the divisions and limitations that non-empathetic eyes have imposed on beings whose semiotics are material rather than abstract.    

Leonardo had a thing for water, the “vehicle of nature” as life-giver and taker, and its natural cycle’s metamorphoses and constant shaping work (often represented in his paintings as rivers running across the wilderness of rocky landscapes). Indeed this workshop has made me reflect on the essence of water not as an abstract, chemical entity, but as a “vehicle of nature”. I felt this quite clearly during our boat trip on the Torridge, particularly once we left behind Appledore’s port, with its engineered banks and crowding boats, and we started encountering immense trees and rolling fields, and many species of bird going about their daily life along the sinuously narrowing river.

In that place it was easier for me to think of water as ‘someone’, perhaps because animals and plants have no means to override water’s agency and have to negotiate with it instead: the trees’ leaves did not grow below the tidal level, birds were floating with the current, and the banks were undulated as the river had designed them. In contrast, back in the port, the tidal bell that didn’t work seemed to me rather emblematic of humans’ tendency to override and thus fail to grasp the workings of nature. I wonder, would the fishes and birds who live with the river make the same mistakes we make in our ‘management practices’? Have our abstract semiotics, which allow us to learn from books and be bound by what we find in them, made us unable to encounter reality with innocent eyes and empathy? Leonardo thought that Experience was the mother of all Knowledge and indeed perhaps certain material semiotics simply escape abstraction and are only accessible if experienced with the boundless intellect and empathy Leonardo had. Perhaps we cannot explain away water as a participating agent, but perhaps we can know it as such by experience when we witness and engage with a system of relationships (such as that which exists between a river, its birds, trees and banks), which water sustains and shapes.

One of my favourite quotes from Leonardo is:

Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses, especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else

Just as water is part of everything that lives and everything that lives is made of water, this workshop has made me feel more than all the other workshops how human and more-than-human are essentially and fundamentally connected, and has made me wish that our academic modes of enquiry and knowledge, and their semiotics, were just as boundless.