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(c) Photo: Ege Kökel, 2022

Liquid tools for River Fiction

A workshop led by The Danube Transformation Agency for Agency

‘Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and axe; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Would you consider a bag a vital tool? Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, we will think about tools as ‘heroes’ or protagonists who drive our stories. In Liquid Tools for River Fiction, we will explore our relationship with the Danube through creating tools. These tools may establish, shift or reshape the relationships between us and the Danube. They may gauge the feeling of proximity and distance, facilitate the process of forgetting or remembering, or give us new lenses to transform familiar shapes into unfamiliar ones. Possibilities are endless and it is your interests, point of view and history that will shape these liquid tools.
 
Liquid Tools for River Fiction opens up what a tool can be. And how can it relate to the Danube? Can it be used to get away from the Danube? Can it have a life of its own? Would it need a manual to operate, someone to operate it, how would this manual look like? Who is in possession of the tool? What's the biography of its owner(s)? If this tool had a commercial, what would the slogan be? If it was part of a performance, what role would it play?
 
As a practice in thinking through making and in context with the Danubian Biosphere, we will create tools. Tools as models/prototypes/protagonists to contextualise and realise our thoughts. We will transform found objects into materialised, ephemeral and latent tools; tools to connect, to act, to think and remember, to enact or to disconnect; tools to breathe, to swim, to make love, to survive, to balance, or to carry stories.
 
 

The field trip on the first trip included a visit to the Sterlet hatchery station with a talk by Christina Gruber at Donauinsel and a guided visit to Nationalpark Donau Auen, including a boat tour along the Altarm.
 
The second day and the third day were dedicated to prototyping ‘tools for river fiction’.

To play the video of the field trip click here or hover over the picture.


 

Art & Science participants: in the box
External participants: Theresa Hajek (Cross-Disciplinary Strategies)
Yuqi Zhou (Trans Arts)

 

Photos from Field Trip

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Liquid tools for River Fiction
April 06, 2022, 9:00h