Designing with the Planet: Connecting Riparian Struggles

A self-organised infrastructure is one that is designed and performed from the bottom up. Not an infrastructure of pipes and wires (although these materialities do matter) but a web of events, meetings, parades, picnics, working groups, miro boards, websites, zoom calls, funding applications, flight paths, train rides, exhibitions, conferences, friendships, hangovers, alongside: masks, catapults, water bottles, plant matter, seeds, sediments, maps, embroidery… and so on. These socio-material events and artefacts compose the basic components of our self-organised infrastructure and together they support the circulation of knowledge and the creation of new socio-ecological relations across the planet, watery site by watery site. 

In our project, we aimed to build solidarity and enhance mutual learning between collectives coalescing around urban waters running through, marking and making each site. Collectives consist of activist and community groups engaged with urban water political ecologies in different ways and with different forms of knowledge according to the specific locations they hail from. It is our situated tactics for creatively engaging and resisting in riparian struggle that we wanted to further develop and share between sites using our self-organised infrastructure. Labtek Apung in Jakarta sends water testing and de-salination devices for defending primate livelihoods to São Paulo, where the Saracura bird mask serves as tactic for mapping and un-covering anti-colonial ecologies of resistance, circulated and re-purposed by Floating University members who host and share learning between nature and culture.

Over the two years we experimented with the idea that by circulating specific riparian matters (including everyday artefacts, maps, plants, seeds, waters, and human bodies amongst many other things) knowledge and tactics can be shared across the planet and become useful for riparian struggles in other places. As our artefacts travelled and events reproduced, tactics were translated and new versions emerged and continued to spread further afield. Through this website, we’d like to share some of the tactics and strategies with you so that they may continue their journeys and transformations, and hopefully become useful in other riparian struggles and build new relations of solidarity across the planet.

Planetary Strategies

With the Cameroonian political theorist, Achille Mbembe’s provocation in mind, we came up with three “planetary strategies” aimed at steering our tactics to build better relations between human and between nonhuman life. These are: strategies of corresponding, of evidencing, and of circulating.

Corresponding, or multispecies correspondences suggests on the one hand opening up new channels of communications between humans and nonhumans to be listened to and felt and in this way become empowered through recognition and empathy. On the other hand, corresponding suggests finding likeness in unlikely places in order to build solidarities while attending to the differences.

Evidencing is to build arguments against pollution, asphaltization or land speculation, to advocate in the name of those riparians who have become hidden or silenced, and to un-earth ecologies of resistance around water bodies towards a horizon of care, repair and healing.

Circulating: is to keep moving, to keep changing. To transform and be transformed. To mix without reducing difference. With the quilombola thinker Nego Bispo, circulations, like streams of water build strength as they confluence.