As I bend down to pick up my bucket, the mud weighs me down. Mud reaching down through its thick plastic container, yearning for the mud below. Gravity pulls mud down, in a last, hopeless attempt to reconnect with kin. I imagine the mud in the bucket sobbing, missing its siblings that it leaves behind as it is lifted off the ground and is removed from its home. Indeed, as I press down the mud in the bucket, water oozes out of its tear glands and drips onto its relatives below. And after a few minutes, when it seems like all the tears have been shed and the mud lies dry, I press down again, and new puddles emerge.

From the art project titled Where the river is by artist Maud van den Beuken, a fellow participant of the Rhine River Lab, I learn that 33 million kilograms of mud is dredged out of the Rotterdam Port each day, which is then disposed of in a big pit in the North Sea so that cruise ships and container ships can enter the harbor without scraping the riverbed. 1

Four hundred years ago and thousands of kilometers away, similar techniques were practiced to make space for commuting along a different river. This river’s name is the Ciliwung, and it meandered through present-day Jakarta until Dutch colonizers arrived at its rivermouth and fundamentally changed its flow. I imagine spades, buckets, and exposed hands scraping the riverbed, depleting it of its soft, cushiony ground. I imagine ships passing through this freshly dredged river, transporting goods like sugar cane and tobacco that were extracted from colonized lands and transported to imperial Europe. And I imagine sediments, minerals, and mud from the highlands gradually pushing forth and filling in the gaps made by the excavations.

As experts in water management, the Dutch drastically changed Dutch waterways and consequently exported their water expertise to the colonies. 2 As such, water plays a significant role in Dutch colonialism, as it, along with plants, nonhuman animals, and humans, was violently exploited.

The Rhine in Rotterdam and the Ciliwung in Jakarta: two rivers seemingly worlds apart, and yet somehow they are braided together through the dredging of their riverbeds. Water connects faraway places as it laps onto Dutch and Indonesian shores. But water also connects these places as it is implicated in global capitalist and colonial activities aiming to instrumentalize the flow of rivers.

The port town of Batavia, the colonial name for present-day Jakarta, lay on an alluvial plain, a flat or gently sloping area of land that is created by the sedimentation deposited by rivers. This plain is frequently flooded due to high tides and the numerous rivers that flow through it. 3 Whereas the wet season often resulted in floods, in the dry season, the town was threatened by a critical decline in potable water.

During the Dutch colonization of the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch built water infrastructures to prevent the numerous floods. This not only happened in Batavia, but was also the case in other colonial settlements such as Paramaribo, Recife, and New Amsterdam (present-day New York). 4 The Dutch were experts in managing water, draining land, and building water infrastructures like canals, dams, and dykes.5 In Batavia, the canals were built to manage the flow of water and to facilitate easy access to the inland for the transportation of goods from upstream plantations to the port. Water turned into a vessel for colonial activities, creating aqueous highways from faraway colonial plantations to the ports of Europe.

Despite attempts to keep the water at bay, Dutch water management technologies in the 17th and 18th centuries frequently failed: during the rainy season, the canals overflowed as there was no room for the river’s ebb and flow, and during the dry season, the canals stagnated, resulting in stench, water-borne diseases, and malaria outbreaks. 6 Furthermore, upstream colonial plantations deposited large amounts of water into the rivers, causing river sedimentation and stagnation. The rivers were not dredged regularly or properly, resulting in further stagnation and sandbars in the rivers. This greatly impeded commerce along Batavia’s waterways and impacted local communities and livelihoods. 7

Fast-forward to present-day Jakarta, and water-related issues persist: canals overflow in the rainy season, neighborhoods lack a clean water supply, and the rivers frequently get clogged by rubbish and industrial waste. 8 These effects are the result of centuries of unsustainable Dutch water management practices during the colonial occupation. What is more, the current postcolonial Indonesian government has adopted Dutch water management practices, thus maintaining a preference for infrastructural solutions that often turn out to be unsustainable. 9

An example of unsustainable water infrastructure is the construction of the West and East Flood Canals in the Ciliwung River in an attempt to mitigate flooding. Both flood canals were planned under colonial administration in the early 20th century. While the West Flood Canal was built in 1918 during the Dutch occupation, due to budget constraints, the East Flood Canal was only built in 2003 under the postcolonial Indonesian government. While no longer under colonial rule, the Indonesian government nonetheless implemented colonial water policies. 10 Despite attempts to mitigate flooding through large-scale infrastructural projects, flooding in Jakarta persists, and some neighborhoods stand underwater year-round. Jakarta’s present-day water-related issues are thus the consequence of harmful colonial and postcolonial water management practices and policies.

Returning to the Rhine River, I think of how these seemingly distant rivers are connected. The dredging project of the Rhine at the Rotterdam Port is motivated by capitalist impulses for river transportation. The colonial dredging project of the Ciliwung in Jakarta is similarly motivated by impulses to make the river navigable for the transportation of extracted resources. Present-day, postcolonial flood-mitigation projects in Jakarta attempt to reverse the dire consequences of dredging with even larger-scale infrastructure. Underlying these projects is the presumption that humans can control water and its flows of sediment. Yet, time and time again, rivers respond in a muddy resurgence against their domination.

Standing ankle-deep in the waters of the Rhine in Arnhem as I excavate mud with my hands, I wonder how we can better attune to the ways the Rhine and the Ciliwung respond to their infrastructural constraints. As we shovelled mud and plantation waste then, and we shovel industrial toxins and microplastics now, we unearth layers of extractivist activities that have settled on the riverbeds. In turn, global rivers respond by filling in the holes we made with fresh sediments and water. Stubborn, lively, unpredictable: river sediments return to tell stories of the past.

I pick up my bucket of mud, and feel how its sediments, its water, and its history weigh down on me. This mud has stories to tell. After feeling its weight, I gently scoop it out of its plastic container and into the Rhine. I watch as the sediments dissipate into the water and create new stories as they flow downstream.