In 1581, in protest against new and experimental works to improve navigation along the River Lea, a group of local merchants began a series of riots in an attempt to sabotage and overthrow the containment of the river. Spoil was dumped in the water, banks cut back and eroded, and chains hung across the channel to prevent the passage of rival bargemen who profited greatly from the faster shipment of goods in and out of London. The rioting merchants may have been motivated by economics rather than an ecological concern for the river’s wellbeing, but their actions speak to a long history of tension in the transformation of river ecosystems for commerce.

This piece combines hydrophone recordings made in the tidal reaches of the River Lea with the reading of a short text (also recorded with a hydrophone) recalling the names of the barges active on the river at the time of the 1581 riots. Heard through water these names are obscured and encrypted, as if rising from the deep in the last breath of a forgotten language. By listening attentively to the varied movement of the water, and speaking (metaphorically) through the river, the hydrophone is used as a tool to critically map the river, drawing upon the speculations offered by Terra Forma to chart ‘points of life’ present above and within the river’s surface ¹. As such I position the river as an ‘embodied entity’ whose edge ‘holds water to a place, and calibrates time across its length’ ². Through obfuscation of this edge, I intend to open up time and space for resistance and opacity; to reflect back upon itself the strangeness of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, and to unearth the histories that percolate through our present environment.

¹ Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire, Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps, trans. Amanda Demarco (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022) ² Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)