Liminal Waterway Countercultures – LIMINALWATER

Our five-country LIMINALWATER consortium will analyse the role of liminal waterway countercultures within two intersecting crises: Europe’s largely imaginary crisis of diversification and its very real ecological crisis. Countercultures emerge in Europe’s liminal waterways as a response to these two crises, and provide models of resilience against them. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water - figuratively or literally - has been central to ways in which communities, artists, activists and municipal actors have re- appropriated post-colonial, post-fascist and post-socialist urban and natural space and place-based memory. We deploy historical, literary, spatial and ethnographic methodologies to explore these multilingual sites of cultural production and conviviality, through which tides of people, ideas and objects flow. Focusing on forgotten or peripheral fresh- and saltwater points of resistance to our twin crises, our cases - some historical and some contemporary - are located in the Atlantic riverports Faro and Liverpool, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille, Algiers and the Balkans, and the riverine network linking central Europe to the Aegean and Balkans.

Specifically, we propose to map and retrieve submerged stories of living resiliently and otherwise with difference and rupture. We will develop eight historical and contemporary waterway case studies (some multi-sited) of ecological resilience, intercultural encounter and fugitive cultural production that constitute counter-cultures of belonging as a resource for narrating European identification differently. The sites are chosen as representing both symbolic centres and margins of the continent and for their rich alternative histories and intercommunal memories, as well as the key place that water holds within, across and sometimes between each of them. Responding to the call aim of exploring how cultural traditions problematize the notion of crisis as a fundamental and critical moment for society and for communities, we posit that each of these sites has produced liminal waterway countercultures, some of which have now been forgotten or are erased from official narratives, others memorialised in municipal and civil society accounts, kept alive in literary or filmic representations, or exploited in new forms of heritage tourism. Crucially, as the rise and fall of empires and ideologies follow the ebb and flow of waterways, our sites are all post-imperial and several are post-fascist or post-Stalinist, requiring a complex reckoning with what is brought to the surface and what remains submerged.

Collaborating with local cultural activists, we will produce visual material across the locations. In Marseille, we have connected with Oksana Chepelyk, a Ukrainian eco-artist who works on the intersection of environmental crisis and the socio-political sphere. Our Portuguese associate partner (AP) is Sciaena, an Algarve NGO for Ocean conservation and awareness-raising. In the UK and Austria, we centre the digital humanities, bringing expertise in digital archival curation (at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities’ Centre for Information Modelling, ZiM), in experimental film-making and gallery collaborations (Everett, Harris, at Southampton and its Winchester School of Art) and in digital cartography (Birkbeck’s Layers of London project based on the Humap platform). Our AP in France is the “Blue” Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) in Marseille, where we will meet twice yearly at its MucemLab research innovation space. To foreground the enlargement partners, our final exhibition will be hosted by our Croatian AP, the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral (PPMHP) in Rijeka. Our non-academic outputs—a digital map and the exhibition—have significant scope for outreach, in response to the toxic crisis-amplification of so much of Europe’s contemporary digital space.