Mississippi Mud Book of Recipes
What follows is a series of stories and recipes taken from our trip down the Mississippi. Some of these stories are recounted from others’ experiences, others are my own, but every recipe was made and (at least partially) invented by us, using our limited equipment and access to fuel, water, stable surfaces, and a roof. (...)
Bookends: Reflections from the River Semester
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An Artist Starts a Mine Tour Company
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Practicing (?) Environmental Justice
What is environmental justice? Is it a movement? Is it an outcome? What follows is my thought process on how environmental justice fits (or doesn’t) into bottom-up and top-down spaces; and how young people should seek to understand it. (...)
River Semester Map and Daily Blog
From August 28 - December 9, 2023, the River Semester travelled downstream with stops at river hubs along the way. Follow their progress as they travel downstream. (...)
Reflections on Confluence 2
From May 25th to May 28th, 2023, the Mississippi River Open School gathered in the Twin Cities for Confluence 2. These four reflections are a multi-faceted portrait of the Confluence. (...)
Mutual Earthly Delights
At the core of a just transition must be a cultural shift to respect water, earth, and all non-human beings. To recognize our delicate position within creation and honor and respect its limits. (...)
Infrastructuring Inequality: Investigations of a Proposed Nickel Mine in Northern Minnesota
Educating the public and students about a controversial underground nickel mine in Tamarack, Minnesota to fuel the transition to electric vehicle (EV) drivership. (...)
Spirituality and Ecology: (Re)Membering Black Women’s Legacies
I no longer have to be cut off from my being. I no longer have to be cut off from the earth. (...)
A River, Both Warm and Cool
This conflict of observational processes and ways of thinking have led to centuries of invalidation of Indigenous science, which, as mentioned many times by Ethan, has proved again and again to offer observations that put one in harmony and understanding of our world, as well as in our cosmology. (...)
Shifting Landscapes: Urban Enslavement in Antebellum New Orleans
Students and faculty around the world began to create new virtual and augmented reality projects like Sojourners' Trail - the first interactive, Afrofuturist classroom game. Sojourners' Trail featured a time-traveling framework to explore Black communities at their peak of social and economic vitality, shattering mythologies of intergenerational poverty and dysfunction among African American families. (...)
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
Experimental film exploring Louisiana’s ecological bodies and their segregation by extractivism—the process of extracting natural resources from the Earth to sell on the world market—witnessed from the water of the Mississippi River, the sky over Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and satellites accessed from a computer in London.
An ongoing work, the film is formed from a variety of materials including images from research trips, oil industry datasets, and audio recording reflecting on the knowledg (...)
A Big River Continuum
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas concentrate complexity, rural Minnesota exhibits it over expansive distances. Many of the issues that have made the Twin Cities the recent focus of national attention are echoed in the state's rural struggles. These include explosive fights over social and racial justi (...)
On the Recuperative Mismanagement of a Cosmopolitan Fish
To close the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, artists created a convivial meal-at-a-distance with so-called invasive species. From a kitchen in Carbondale, Illinois, artist Sarah Lewison, alongside storyteller and soul food authority Swan Parsons, prepare a meal of Asian carp, opening up questions related to an eco-logic of planetary care and our relationships to habitat. From Berlin and Chicago, artist and biologist Andrew Yang, biologist Florian Rutland and artist Alexandra Toland prep (...)
Water Language: A Conversation with Shanai Matteson and Oscar Tuazon
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas concentrate complexity, rural Minnesota exhibits it over expansive distances. Many of the issues that have made the Twin Cities the recent focus of national attention are echoed in the state's rural struggles. These include explosive fights over social and racial justi (...)
Drawn Together
In designing and operating large-scale infrastructures, humans tend toward fixity—despite increasingly dynamic conditions, such as those at play in the Mississippi River Delta context. The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” sought to explore the multi-scalar effects of such human interventions, and how new futures might be imagined that engage and work with these dynamics. To do so, the seminar employed the practice of drawing as its core method (...)
Born Secret
The video follows this “Anthropocene mode of production” to its top-secret origin at Oak Ridge Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project drew on hydroelectric power furnished by the river-basin development program of the Tennessee Valley Authority. (...)
After Extraction
This field guide combines creative non-fiction and images to depict a partial history of extractive land use in Central Illinois, and is accompanied by a set of exercises, questions, and prompts that act as a tool for learning about the lands where you are. Both texts are complemented by artist Ryan Griffis’ video work on the destruction of wetlands during colonial expansion. (...)
Edible Encounters
Edible Encounters gave us an opportunity to observe the contrast between the wild bursts of biodiversity in the marginal areas along the river and the widespread control of nature exemplified by the endless cornfields in this region. These series of edible encounters and territorial mash-ups offered interpretations of foods that have bioregional origins or are part of long-standing Indigenous traditions or both. It was an opportunity to look to Indigenous knowledge, tradition, and creativity to (...)
Good River, Bad River, Little River, Big River
“Mississippi” is a francophone adulteration of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Algonquin) name given to the river, indicating something along the lines of how “great” or “big” a river it is. “People are enthralled by it,” Bob Chance, manager of Itasca State Park told the Star Tribune in 2018: “They are amazed that it is that small.” Way down south, the river is an accumulator, full of the life-effluent of an industrialized nation, its cares, concerns, and contaminants. But here, at Lake Itasca, we hear fro (...)