I will forever be grateful for this dwelling place, since living intimately with the river’s stream in this specific place enabled my feeling-thinking as and alongside water to emerge. 1 And now, I was able to share this special place with the kindred spirits joining me in meeting the river in many ways during the lab.

During this skill share, each of us crafted a water filter from materials found along the Rhine river’s shore.

Protocol for making a DIY a water filter

1.
Gather an empty plastic bottle, (activated) charcoal, sand, gravel, pebbles, and a piece of cloth, ideally all along the shore of the Rhine River. Optional: a twig from one of the willow trees.

2.
Cut an empty plastic bottle at about two-thirds of the bottle, measuring from the top down.

3.
Turn the upper part of the plastic bottle upside-down. This is the container for the water filter.

4.
Put a piece of cloth all the way down the bottle: this makes up the base of the filter.

5.
On top of that, put generous layers of consecutively (activated) charcoal, sand, gravel, and pebbles.

6.
Optional: Carve two holes in the upper part of the bottle to make a carrier handle from a twig from one of the shoreline’s many willows.

Protocol for filtering river water 

1.
Walk to the shore of the Rhine River and situate yourself right next to an easy-to-reach part of the stream so you can. If that is not an option, gather a bucket of water from the Rhine River and place it next to your body.

2.
Use the bottom part of the plastic bottle to scoop water from the bucket into the
filter and let it drip into an empty container.

3.
Let the water run through the filter 2-3 times.

4.
Boil the water. Now it is drinkable.

5.
As you drink the water, thank the river for providing you with this gift.

Bottles were cut, layers built, and the river was transported aboard the ship in buckets. And not long after that, water was dripping into the glass jars we brought with us. Each filter created its own echo of the river: a soundscape of many hands, of many drops. In the meantime, water was drunk directly from the filter, too (I would strongly recommend boiling it first).

(Un)filtering Polyphony

I guided our filtering with the following question: how does it feel to filter the river’s stream? This question is still the same as the one I asked my comrades three years ago, when I invited some of them to filter water with me at the river’s shore. At the time, I thought of the DIY water filters as feeling-thinking devices for remembering watery relations through conversation, drawing up maps through the words we put out in the world. To me, DIY-ing the water filters was a way to come to know the abstract journey from river surface water to tap water hands-on; I approached the filters as affective devices derived from touch, gesturing towards a feeling of relationality with the waters we inhabit – and that inhabit us in return.

They then moved on to function as instruments during my graduation work (Un)filtering Polyphony, in which some of the same comrades filtered water as part of the installation, generating a soundscape as the water dropped into glass containers. At the end of the exhibition, I offered the filtered water to the river, returning it to its stream. To me, these actions were poetic in nature, yet still very real: the filtering sounds urged one to listen to the instrumental agency of the water filters, and the offering was an act of returning the gift to the river. 2

I presented the work for the first time in 2022. Coming back to the artwork three years later, I am confronted with the negligence of my past self. The turn towards DIY water filters was an attempt to address the river’s pollution through repairing the kinship relations with the river. However, like many white artists and scholars, I failed to recognise the environmental pollution of the river because of an ongoing logic of coloniality, fuelled by a rhetoric of modernity.3

Rhine Governance and Control

Coloniality persists today in the epistemic and ontological frameworks that determine how the river is perceived and related to. A modern dualistic worldview separating nature from culture, human from non-human, the Global North from the Global South, and mind from body lies at the core of (historical) colonialism. This worldview has justified the horrors of the Middle Passage, genocide, and the violent disruption of kinship relations and knowledge practices. Current river governance practices still reflect this worldview: the river is exploited as a resource (water), as infrastructure (inland shipping), and as a waste channel (waste disposal) in service of modernity’s promise of progress and economic growth.

The promise of progress and economic growth propelled the development of advanced water management technologies following the same colonial logics. For the Rhine, it meant that some of her river arms were amputated, dams were built, and her meanderings became straighter. These technologies are methods of control for the purpose of crafting optimal conditions for international trade. The same technologies were transported to the former Dutch colonies: Eurocentric exceptionalism propelled the migration of these same technologies to colonised lands, violently disrupting and discrediting Indigenous water caretaking practices to facilitate the plantation economy and further colonial expansion. Water management technologies replaced and ultimately erased other forms of governance. As such, they not only reflect or reproduce a certain worldview, but they create specific worlds, too.

Water Filters: filtrate, residue and kinship relations

Water purification filters are one such a technology. More and more advanced purification technologies take shape in response to the river’s contamination. They are a temporary fix for the so-called dark side of modernity. Water filters enable the reproduction of the same colonial logics, because they embody an illusion of damage reversal: if pollutants can be extracted from the river’s stream, there is no direct need to change the cause of pollution. Water purification is therefore not only a case of public health and safety, but simultaneously a process that facilitates progress and economic growth. This shows that the technology of water purification is not neutral, but a cultural expression of modernity.

Where water purification is a cultural expression of modernity, water filters are the tools through which it is expressed. Filtering water is a process of transformation. As water flows through the layers of pebble, gravel, sand, charcoal, and cloth, non-water particles (e.g. pesticides, bacteria, grains of sand, or duckweed) get stuck in between the gravel or adhere to the charcoal. It is a controlled process of leaking that results in a filtrate (the ‘clean’ water) and a residue (the ‘dirty’ pollutants). Water filters reduce the river – with all its pesticides, bacteria, grains of sand, and duckweed – to a binary: it is either a useful resource (filtrate) or useless sludge (residue). Water filters thus enable the modern logic of separation. Water filtering, then, could be a process of bringing a dualistic world into existence.

I am reminded of a question that an artist friend prompted when she saw my graduation work. As she looked at the water dripping through the filters, she asked: “What about the river’s memory?” The DIY water filters were intended to repair kinship relations through attentive filtering and listening. Yet I still participated in the act of filtering itself, following modernity’s logic of separation. As the filtrate seeps through, water’s memories stay behind. Despite my intentions to foster a space that honoured the many kinship relations we have with the Rhine, I was making these very relations disappear by the act of filtering. I am grateful for this friend, because she made me see that water filters are more than technologies of separation; they are technologies of erasure, too. As memories stay behind, kinship ties are severed. The river is violently stripped from her past, rendering it impossible to sense-trace the river’s becoming.

Yet water filters are still very real and necessary tools for earthly survival, especially within the sacrifice zones of (climate) coloniality. These resource-rich zones and their communities – often located in the Global South – are heavily exploited for the Global North’s economic gain.4 Waters are either contaminated or drying up, and clean drinking water is scarce. The necessity of water filters in those highly contaminated regions reflects the global inequalities and injustices that modernity produces through colonial violence.

My feeling-thinking as and alongside water has recently brought me to Nishnaabe writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Theory of Water. She urges us to think with the theories that water, Nibi, “holds for living, organising and making worlds beyond the ones we’ve inherited from colonialism and racial capitalism” in light of the present moment of climate catastrophe, ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo, and the State’s descent into fascism.5

In the book, she provides us with the ethical framework of sintering. Sintering is a phenomenon that occurs when snowflakes join bonds. “It is a process of changing from a singular, angular snowflake to a more rounded form of bonded crystals, or a snowpack.“6 Sintering is a practice of world-making focused on joining bonds with neighbours without destroying anything that is already there. Sintering means weaving oneself into the existing fabric of life.7

Modernity does not sinter, it severs. It rips apart carefully woven seams until the separate patches are no longer recognised as a whole. As modernity’s offspring, we owe it to the land and its communities of struggle to unlearn the rhetoric of modernity and instead learn how to sinter: to re-attach ourselves to the patches that we call tree, comrade, or Rhine. We owe it to the land and its communities of struggle to reply to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s call to think from our own grounded normativity. And we owe it to the land and its communities of struggle to keep listening to that which lies beyond the voice of modernity.

What is left from that morning in October are memories of bonds joining: a feeling of gratefulness to be able to share my former home with kindred spirits; being able to invite them into a small part of my inner world; and seeing all of us work together – riverbed sand, pebbles, twigs, human beings – to craft the filters. These memories are my reminder that even amid complex and violent modern systems, one can open oneself up to the world and form bonds.