Registration & Programme
Registration is open!


Download Materials:
Symposium  Workshops PDF
Symposium Research Abstracts PDF


WATER AS METHOD: SPACE, PLACE & THE HYDROLOGICAL GAZE IN MOVING IMAGES
THURSDAY - FRIDAY // 19 - 20 JUNE
GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
REID AUDITORIUM

SPEAKERS & CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE:

Keynote
🔹Dr. Laleh Khalili — The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, Online (Author of Sinews of War and Trade, Professor of International Politics)

Introduction
🔹 Symposium curator Kelly Rappleye on the Hydrological Gaze

🔹 Curator Talk & Exhibition tour — Jelena Sofronijevic of EMPIRE LINES Podcast
Questing Under—and Across—Seas: Zeljko Kujundzic in Scotland 
Sofronijevic presents SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries at the Travelling Gallery 

Workshops
🔹 Maria Howard – Maria Howard: Loops and Cuts: disrupting linear histories of the Forth & Clyde canal through site-writing and moving image
🔹 Moira Salt – aqueous becomings* Experimental sound workshop on diasporic canal imaginaries
🔹 Eleni Wittbrodt – Sounding the Clyde: Drifting with Marguerite Duras
🔹 Chang Meng – Wet utopias (performance online)


FieldARTS Presentations
🔹 Fred Carter – Dual-Use: Logistics, Reversals, & Infrastructural Aesthetics on the Clyde River Corridor 
🔹 Sonia Levy & Ifor Duncan – Fascism & the Deep: The Submerged Image

Research Presenters Convened by Dr. Struan Gray 
🔹 Dr. Struan Gray – Rivers of memory in Chilean documentary
🔹 M. Ty, Arieh Frosh & Ed Compson, Sepncer Hurley, Ian Harvey Claros, Emily Beaney, Bryony Gillard,
Avi Varma, Christina Peake, Matt Parry,  Harriet Crisp and many more...

Practice-Led Presentations
🔹 Rachael Ryder – Vessels of Passage: Remembering the Derry Boat and Irish Migration
🔹Curating Currents: Circular Exhibitions (2023) — Bengü Gün
🔹Cache — Xiyao Chen
🔹Conjuring the Ocean: Archival Methods Meet Art Practice — Christina Peake
🔹Fluid Borders — Emily Beaney
🔹My Wits or Salts — Bryony Gillard
🔹90 Miles— Rosa Prosser
& More!

Closing Event: Submerged Cinemas: River as Method
CCA Theatre, 18:30–20:30
🔹Films by Sonia Levy, Ifor Duncan, and Hope Pearl Strickland
Discussion moderated by Fred Carter

This event is curated and organised by Kelly Rappleye (AHRC-SGSAH PhD, Glasgow School of Art, Art Curator 16Collective) as part of doctoral research, and hosted by the GSA's School of Fine Art research. The programme is organised with collaborators with FieldARTS research programme of the Infrastructure Humanities Group (University of Glasgow).




DAY 1 – THURSDAY, 19 JUNE


Location: Glasgow School of Art | Reid Building & Surroundings

🔹 Opening
Welcome & Introduction to the Programme
9:00–9:15 | Reid Auditorium

🔹 Panel 1: Liquid Landscapes of Memory in Film
9:15–10:45 | Reid Auditorium
Chair: Struan Gray
  • Where Memory Flows: Rivers as Spaces of Memory in Post-Conflict Chilean Film — Struan Gray
  • Nonhuman Memory-Work in the Practice of Martha Atienza — Ian Harvey Claros
  • Groundlessness: The Sea and the Archive in John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015) — Spencer Hurley
  • It Is Time to Say to the Water, "Disobey" — M. Ty (online, pre-recorded)
    Palestinian hydrological resistance and the work of Jumana Emil Abboud

🔹 Panel 2: Hydrocritical Geographies & Infrastructures
11:00–12:30 | Reid Auditorium
Convened by Struan Gray
  • The Doggerland Energy Complex — Arieh Frosh & Ed Compson
  • Veins of Saltwater: Archipelagic Resistance in the Gulf — Shahriar Khonsari (online)
  • Flume Study 4: Aesthetics of Turbulent Waves — Avi Varma

🔹 Curatorial Introduction & Exhibition Visit
12:30–13:45
  • Questing Under—and Across—Seas: Zeljko Kujundzic in Scotland — Jelena Sofronijevic
    With curatorial intro to SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries (Travelling Gallery)
  • Drop-in exhibition visit & curator tour | Stow Building Car Park

🔹 Artist-Led Workshops: Embodied & Situated Practices
14:00–16:30 | Various Locations
(Participants choose one)
  • Aqueous Becomings: Soundscapes and Diasporic Canal Mythologies — Moira Salt
    Sound workshop | Stow Building & Forth & Clyde Canals
  • Loops and Cuts: Disrupting Canal Histories through Site-Writing — Maria Howard
    Site-writing & moving image workshop | Reid Seminar Room 1 & Forth & Clyde Canal
  • Sounding Waterways: Part I & II — Eleni Wittbrodt & Chang Meng
    Screening and presentation | Reid Auditorium
    • Part I: Sounding the Clyde – new work by Eleni Wittbrodt + screening Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979) by Marguerite Duras
    • Part II: Wet Utopia: Rehydrated by Tea — Chang Meng (online presentation)

🔹 Keynote Lecture (online)
17:00–18:00 | Reid Auditorium
Dr. Laleh Khalili – The Corporeal Life of Seafaring
Author of Sinews of War and Trade, Professor of International Politics

DAY 2 – FRIDAY, 20 JUNE


Location: Glasgow School of Art | Reid Building

🔹 Parallel Panels: Practice-Led Presentations – Watery Methods
9:15–10:30

Panel A: Aqueous Archives: Vessels, Migrations, & Imaginaries | Reid Auditorium
  • Vessels of Passage: Remembering the Derry Boat — Rachael Ryder
  • Conjuring the Oceans: World-Building Ancestral Marine Ecosystems — Christina Peake
  • Six Knots — Ali Vanderkruyk

Panel B: Fluid Subjectivities & Watery Bodies | Reid Seminar Room 1
  • Fluid Borders — Emily Beaney
  • 90 Miles — Rosa Prosser
  • East German Queerness and the Sea as Hydrokinetic Motif — Matt Parry (online)

🔹 Panel C: Reading (for) Water: Hydropolitics
10:45–12:45 | Reid Auditorium
  • Curating Currents: Circular Exhibitions (2023) — Bengü Gün
  • Modern Water — Harriet Crisp
  • My Wits or Salts — Bryony Gillard
  • Cache — Xiyao Chen

🔹 FieldARTS 1
13:45–14:45 | Reid Auditorium
  • Dual-Use: Logistics, Reversals, and Infrastructural Aesthetics on the Clyde — Fred Carter

🔹 FieldARTS 2
15:00–16:00 | Reid Auditorium
  • Fascism and the Deep: The Submerged Image — Ifor Duncan & Sonia Levy

🔹 Submerged Cinemas: River as Method – Closing Film Event
18:30–20:30 | CCA Theatre
Film programme curated with FieldARTS
Featuring works by Sonia Levy, Ifor Duncan, and Hope Pearl Strickland
Discussion moderated by Fred Carter

SUBMERGED CINEMAS: RIVER AS METHOD

 FieldARTS x Water As Method
18:30 - 20:30, Friday 20 June, 2025
CCA Theatre

films & discussion by Sonia Levy, Hope Pearl Strickland, and Ifor Duncan with fred carter



The concluding event of the Water as Method symposium invites audiences into a riverine and lagoonal cinema, with an evening of moving image and discussion with FieldARTS artists, presenting films by Sonia Levy, Hope Pearl Strickland, and Ifor Duncan and discussion moderated by Fred Carter. Engaging with rivers and lagoons as political, material, and mnemonic bodies, these films explore hydrological geographies as archives of colonial extraction, environmental degradation, memory, and resistance.

Each work stages forms of hydro-reflexivity: a cinematic practice of thinking and sensing with water—not only as subject but as method, material, and media. Across Jamaican and UK waterways, the Venetian Lagoon, and the Cauca River in Colombia, these films immerse us in turbid ecologies, sedimented temporalities, and submerged histories.

The screening will be followed by a moderated discussion with the artists, and FieldARTS founder Fred Carter, opening space for collective reflection on watery methods, hydro-necrology, transnational hydrosocial imaginaries, and the ethics of filmmaking ‘from below’.

This event is curated and organised by Kelly Rappleye (AHRC-SGSAH PhD, Glasgow School of Art, Art Curator 16Collective) as part of doctoral research, and generously funded by SGSAH Engagement Funding. 

Film Programme:

Ifor Duncan — Soy el Río Cauca (2025)
22 minutes. Spanish with English subtitles
“Soy el río Cauca y mis aguas podrían afectar tu salud” [I am the river Cauca and my waters may be harmful to your health] (two-channel video, 15.00, 2024) unpacks the compounded social and environmental impacts of the Hidroituango megadam on the Cauca river, Colombia. Through the voices of members of Movimiento Ríos Vivos Antioquia (MRVA), footage and submerged sound from the reservoir, the video tells the story of the concurrent mourning of the loss of family as well as the river.

Sonia Levy — We Marry You, O Sea (2023)
26 minutes. Underwater video, sound.

We Marry You, O Sea engages with Venice and its lagoon “from below,” with the aim of focusing attention on the city’s submerged, life-giving, and altered bio-geomorphological processes rather than on its often-recounted political and military histories. Underwater filmmaking opens new ways of knowing the materialities of the Venice Lagoon and exposes a fractured and troubled environment that complicates mainstream historical narratives that start above the water’s surface. By attuning to the ebb and flood of the lagoon, we start sensing the interplay between land and water, life and decay, and the intimate processes shaping this environment. Noticing the kinds of life made possible in this damaged watery space compels us to delve into the ways it has been profoundly transformed.

Hope Pearl Strickland — A River Holds a Perfect Memory (2024)
17 minutes. Digital, 16mm, archival. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Touchstones, Rochdale.
This lyrical, layered work meanders across Jamaican rivers and Northern English reservoirs, meditating on water’s entanglement with labour, colonial time, and diasporic memory. Shifting between archival footage, 16mm film, and LIDAR scans, Strickland charts how waterways reflect and remember industrial impact and transatlantic resistance. The film draws its title from Toni Morrison and builds from protest actions in Jamaica’s St Elizabeth parish, foregrounding water’s capacity to hold submerged social tensions and stories.


Artist Bios:

Sonia Levy is a Berber-Polish artist filmmaker whose interdisciplinary, site-responsive practice explores the entanglements of Western extractivism and hydrosocial transformation. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, ICA London, Arnolfini, Ocean Space, ZKM Karlsruhe, BALTIC, and internationally across museums, art centres, and research forums. She was the 2023–24 European Marine Board artist-in-residence for the UN Ocean Decade and the 2022 S+T+ARTS4Water resident with TBA21–Academy in Venice. Her writing has appeared in MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, Antennae Journal, and Parallax. Levy has presented research at Harvard GSD, NYU Gallatin, UC Santa Cruz, and Goldsmiths, where she is also an external member of the Centre for Critical Global Change. She lectures at the RCA School of Architecture, co-convenes the collective howlikeareef.net, and serves on the Steering Committee for the UN Ocean Decade’s ‘Connecting People and the Ocean.’ She is currently a guest researcher at NICHE, Ca’ Foscari University.

Ifor Duncan is Postdoctoral Researcher on the EcoViolence ERC project at Utrecht University. His interdisciplinary research and art-practice focuses on political violence in the contexts of devastated river systems and dispossessed communities. He approaches the weaponisation of rivers as borders, mega-dams, and as the mediums and dynamic archives of genocide through cultural memory and an audio-visual practice that involves submerged methods. Ifor has a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, where he was also Lecturer, and has been Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at NICHE, Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice.

Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK with British-Jamaican heritage. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Her practice wrestles with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempts to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control. Hope’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Scotland and Exis Experimental Film Festival, Seoul. She was awarded the 2023 Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize.

Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow and founder/director of FieldARTS, a residency programme for infrastructural fieldwork, currently hosted by the University of Glasgow’s Infrastructure Humanities Group. He was recently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His current monograph, Poetry & Energy After 1973, explores petrocapitalism, exhaustion, and poetic refusal. His research and practice traverse ecological poetics, energy humanities, and experimental field methodologies. His chapbook Outages is published with Veer2.