Nadine Live Conversation
In collaboration with Nadine, we invite two guests / two rivers, Zenne and Sambre, represented by Natural Contract Lab and Vincent Meessen for a conversation about two rivers, the Senne/Zenne and the Sambre: Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and vinny jones of Natural Contract Lab, and Vincent Meessen / Olivier Pestiaux. At Kunsthal Ghent, where Jubilee can work as part of the development programme Permanently Practising
10/12/2024, 19-21h

[0] Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and vinny jones introduce Natural Contract Lab. “Fabulating Resilient Rivers and Collective Stewardship”. Practicing a practice, learning from damaged landscapes / ecocide. Commemorating landscapes [2] How to represent other than human entities in court? Especially damaged landscapes? A river doesn’t want to be in court, but it can teach us about restoring relationships.
Rights of nature, ecological grief, restorative justice, among others: Transdisciplinary practice. Practicing through and with each other's disciplines. Including the river as an ally in our practice. Unlearning -and learning each others vocabulary, understanding the complexity of relations

[7] Still Here, An alliance of care for the SZenne river. Walking from the source to the bifurcation, along bodies of water, mixing the territories by mixing the water, which contains the memories. Water contains the memory of our presence around it. Preserving it as a marker of our intentions with the river. Vessel for their intentions towards the water. A resilient river - using idea that the river is a healer, and we can learn from it. The act of 'walking with'. Walking to the territory, finding people who have a relation with it, from that space of knowing, they wander. [11] Walking-with (participatory artistic walks): involving people who have a relationship with the river, showing the way. Getting to know the space. Wandering. Creating an empathy with the river. Becoming witnessing bodies. First: coming from a place of grief to acknowledge the landscapes we have lost. Clay as a medium to map the territory - an embodied way of getting to know that river, and its solidarity waters around. [15] Activism and Guardians of the river, some of them formalized. Growing an alliance: digging and searching for relationships people have with the river. [16] Grief and memory are useful to restore relationships, reactivate a relationship with the river. Second : learning from the ecosystem. Other paradigms of relations of care. Invisibility of stories. Bringing people’s voices into the juridical framework and rights of nature. Rivers already collaborate, regulate, for instance the caterpillar, and the swimming bladder, special organ of fish to regulate their floating capacity. Stories that emerge from this material dialogue. [19] Tools of stewardship. What can we do as guardians of the river? We know that laws have failed. Learning from the river and shift our ways of caring.Changing the ways in which we relate to it and interact with it, not everyone wants to be an activist, shifting ways of care and guardianship. [21] About the Szenne in Brussels. Wanted to use an hydrophone to amplify the voice of the river. Not allowed, plus the river is silent. But anyone can open the put lids. [24] The river is not only the water, it’s a living ecosystem. Valuing personal connections with the river just as much as the actions of politicians. Giving legitimacy. Reciprocal guardianship. Rights of nature and river gardians, can shift also when you meet a lot of different rivers and their gardians. Difference in the idea and experience of the river. River is complex, it’s the banks, the beds, people, living ecosystem of relationships. Valuing everyone and everything on a same level - love, reciprocal gardianship. [26] Did you ever lose a landscape? The resilience of the river can teach us a lot. We have all lost landscapes. We are constantly confronted with disappearing landscapes.
Szenne as a resilient rivers: it has previously been proclaimed dead and excluded from mappings of Belgian rivers.
[28] Trees as supporters. Grief circles around trees. Loss, using clay to shape and commute to each others landscape. Circles as processes of letting go, teaching about loss, finding time to allocate that loss in the landscape. Work with the weather 🌦️ where do we put the loss? Who can take this?
[30] Sensorial cartography. Emotive approach. Questioning the facts. Not opposing but adding the emotive sides of losses of landscapes, because the facts are not enough in court. Climatologists - empathy. Replacing facts with the meaningful relationships that people have with the river. Different disciplines and different tools - people just meet because of the water. in that way, you unlearn roles as well. It’s more based on memories and relations with the water/river
[32] Walking with. Digital archive. Bill of rights - preambule of legitimacy. Tools to sense the river. Fabulative storytelling as a preamble to a law. We shall have a lawmaking Living Bill of Rights for the Szenne River that shall be brought to the parliament in 2026.

[38] Vincent Meessen introduces his relationship towards the project Sambre 2030. Initiator Olivier Pestiaux traveled the river on a boat from the source in France to the confluence with the Maas. Shock: on a small boat, river was totally invisible. At some parts, the river is actually negated. Sambre is the first river that has been completely embanked in Europe. PICTURE: Picture: La Loire, 1966 "It’s like an eye, as if the river is looking at you." Inversion of the look from the river to the land. Meeting the work that has been done around la Loire, complete other way of working with the river. Loire Parliament. Camille de Toledo. Reworking hearings that have been conducted around la Loire Invited a lot of experts - Camille de Toledo experimented with writing Le fleuve qui voulait ecrire - book [40] A river should speak for itself. A river should look for itself. The river that wanted to write its own story.
[41] Legal personhood for the river.
[46] Cause commune/Common cause Sambre. Olivier Pestiaux organising different working groups, Vincent Meessen is more an advisor, walks - jurisdiction, meet 6 times between 2023 and 2025, lawyers, philosophers of law, law and sociology, environment, from France and Belgium Mostly meeting online, stakeholders, companies - artistic group: how can artists develop actions, to gain a legal status for the river by 2030 - environmental working group Roles, research in art, funding, open proposal to a small collective. [48] Goal: legal personhood for the river by 2030.
[50] Photographer Gilles Saussier French photographer, challenging the categories of documentary photography, anthropologist has worked a lot in Bangladesh where the landscape changes with the seasons, there are cultivatable parts of land that do not exist for longer than a year, but are still named for the period that they exist.
[54] A map showing the life of the river Mississippi. Ghosts of the river. Lives of the river completely invisibilised today.
[56] The more people are speaking about the Sambre, the better it is. Learning with university students how to relate to the river Geographer reading the city, social geography
[58] Rivers as transnational and regional matters. Complex legal representationality, but mostly just advising, no enforcing power.
[59] About the river in Charleroi and Thuin
[1:06] Working on a bill to allow the river to defend itself Artists: practice along a territory <> structural framework that is very large, actors, stakeholders Les contrats de rivières, regional matter International part NAT - notre affaire a tous [1:07] 3 legal ways of recognizing rivers (constitutional, Ecuador, Mar Menor Spain; legislative, New Zealand; jurisprudence/legal activism, Colombia, India).
[1:09] Cultural ways of recognizing rivers (indigenous legal animism, legal animism, scientific-based legal animism)
[1:10] Recognizing rights of nature. The law of the commons: exempting nature from the right to ownership, whether private or public. Family of the commons and family of the lawyer [1:14] Gilles Saussier, photographer and gardener 👨‍🌾 Introduce photography - mission photographique, working on territories to register them. Gilles Saussier is questioning this. Write a declaration/law, never forget law is always dealing with fiction Photography not to map the territory but make things visible to a larger audience
[1:15] Law as fiction. Giambattista Vico (early 19th century) - the origin of poetry and law. Jurisprudence: bringing together history, philosophy, law. Matching laws to facts.
Different ways of writing (also photography) to change the course of law Experiment with law writing as a form, photography possibly one of them. Entities and personalities
[1:20] Different types of non-human subjects:
-non-human relational subjects (Sambre)
-collective non-human subjects (bees live in colonies)
-individual non-human subjects (...)
Need to allocate legal statuses, legal fictions to these types (like associations, interest groups etc did not have these until in the 19th century). (Compare the legal fiction of the adopted child.)
[when?] Sarah Vanuxem
[1:25] Personhood legally speaking implies assets: personal development which means the potential (of a person, of a river)
[1:26] Robots as human-made entities with obligations but no rights
[1:27] Namur 2030

Conversation [1:30] Cartography is a way of tracing and seizing something. Different from embodying a relationship. Cartography as possessing, as opposed to cultivating a relationship with a river.
Scripts as cartography. Preambule from harvest of the walking System of archiving - for each walk there are categories. The scripts are the cartography of the territory / score / to hear, observe, always referring, as conditions of attention. Then the stories and memories come. > Script shapes the potentiality for the relationships to appear. Relationality, happens in the doing, stories become a cartography of the river, passing on, retelling, dissolve the idea of the river as a line. Digital space to become the preambule. [1:38] ‘Living bill’ for the river: the point is not the text of the bill, the bill is actually the walk along the river. You experience the bill by walking through the territory. Citizen participation in law. They are only effective if people reenact them. The bill becomes redundant, it’s just a tool for reestablishing relationships Even if there will be a text. The goal is to develop relationships with the river to such an extent that the bill is redundant.
Part about shaping relations and bridging gaps, with what lense you look at the river. Meessen grew up next to the Sambre. [1:44] “I don’t believe in any law”
[1:49] Passing a bill or a law recognizing rights of nature can imply the responsibility of the driving individuals as life-long tutors or guardians
[1:55] There are contexts where people can truly say: “If the river dies, I die”
How do we define life? How do we do this in a capitalist society?
[1:57] Inversed relations. Law is made for the rich.
Haka speech in New Zealand parliament. MP who did this was a lawyer, activating a law that had been repressed since colonialism.
[2:00] Embankment of the Sambre was never a public decision. We are all colonized by capitalism.
[2:02] When Lake Erie (?) acquired a legal status, companies and farmers around started suing the guardians because of loss of business freedom.
[2:05] Most of our world in transformation has been framed by legal fictions of 200 years ago. How to reconnect with the elemental?
[2:09] Zsenne Garden.
Part of Ecole Mondiale: 320 cristals charged by Zsenne water, buried in the ground in a grid around Brussels. Ive Van Bostraeten: Gaiagraphy

[2:16] end