liquid memories

Follow Y/Our River

— Riverine Ecologies and Deep Mapping

Lower Lea Valley, East London (UK) / 2022–2024

River walking / Deep mapping / Riverine archives / Relational portraiture / Ecological publishing / More-than-human methodologies

Follow Y/Our River is a long-term artistic research project developed along the River Lea, tracing its course from source to confluence with the Thames. Situated within the hydro-social landscape of the Lower Lea Valley, the project investigates the river as ecological system, infrastructural corridor, and living archive shaped by centuries of industrial extraction, urban development, and hydrological transformation.

Rather than treating the river as subject of representation, the project positions it as collaborator and method — a dynamic system through which to rethink image-making, publishing, and collective attention.

Walking and photography operate as primary tools of inquiry. Through sustained dérive, embodied encounters, and site-responsive gestures, the project explores how human and more-than-human agencies co-inhabit riverine space.

Artists

paula roush
tamara stoll
hḗrā santos

Project unfolding

Follow Y/Our River began in autumn 2022 as an artist-led residency initiated at Bow Locks — once home to the msdm House-Studio-Gallery. The project unfolded along the Lea Valley, a territory shaped by ancient springs, reservoirs, industrial waterways, flood control systems, and post-industrial regeneration schemes.

The residency activated the valley as a living archive of water infrastructures and ecological memory. Moving between source and estuary, the artists engaged with archaeological remains, East London waterworks, sculptural interventions, biodiversity zones, and informal social uses of the riverbanks.

The river’s tidal condition — governed by the Thames and, ultimately, by Atlantic currents — became a structuring principle. Temporal cycles of flow and retreat informed both the walking methodology and the editorial processes that emerged from it.

Research focus

The project asks:

• How can walking function as a form of ecological listening?
• What forms of relational portraiture emerge when attention shifts from individual subjects to entangled systems?
• How can publishing operate as a watery strategy — fluid, permeable, non-linear?

Follow Y/Our River examines:

• river valleys as layered territories of labour, extraction, ritual, and memory;
• water infrastructures as political and ecological actors;
• the potential of deep mapping to reveal micro-histories embedded within landscape;
• the role of editorial practice in producing situated ecological knowledge.

Methodology: walking, image-making, and publishing as research

The work unfolds through the entanglement of three strands:

1. River walking and deep mapping

Through repeated walks from source to estuary, the artists traced historical, ecological, and infrastructural layers of the Lea Valley. Deep mapping functioned not as cartographic representation but as embodied practice — attentive to sensory experience, micro-encounters, and overlooked transitions.

2. Relational portraiture

Portraiture was reconfigured as a hybrid, mobile method capturing the river’s multi-species inhabitants — people, animals, plants, infrastructures — within shared spatial conditions. Ritual gestures were inscribed into landscape, foregrounding presence over documentation.

3. Publishing as watery strategy

The project generated publications, manuals, performances, and workshops that treat publishing not as output but as process. The river’s temporal and material logic informed editorial decisions — fragmentation, layering, prompts, performative reading.

Publishing here operates as a fluid structure: responsive, iterative, and permeable to encounter.

Workshops

Workshops developed within Follow Y/Our River translate field-based research into embodied collective practice.

The Follow Y/Our River Workshop offers a detailed exploration and reinterpretation of landscape, engaging with political, social, economic, infrastructural, and environmental dimensions. The methodology foregrounds small-scale, personal encounters with place as critical tools of knowledge production.

Participants are guided through the key principles of deep mapping, combining walking, observation, archival attention, and reflective publishing processes to produce situated readings of territory.

A parallel workshop strand introduces wateryquery — a methodology for creating with water that bridges conceptual thinking with intuition, affect, and care. Here, water functions not only as material but as epistemic agent.

Public Programmes and Presentations

Follow Y/Our River extends beyond fieldwork and publication into a series of presentations, workshops, and performative formats through which the research is publicly articulated and collectively activated.

The project has been presented in the context of visual culture, ecological thinking, site-based practice, and photobook discourse, including:

– Counter-Image Conference 2024 'CULTURA VISUAL E PENSAMENTO ECOLOGICO:
RE-IMAGINAR AS RELACOES NO MUNDO’ (Visual Culture and Ecological Thinking: Reimagining Relationships in the World) Florianópolis/SC, Brasil August 2024 [link] 02 4

– Photography and Site – Routes, Cartographies and Drifts, International Conference of Photography Studies, Universidade da Madeira / Madeira University, Funchal, December 2023 [link]

– Image, Archive & Conflict: (Im)material Ecologies in the Digital Age online conference, September 2023 [link]

– Photobook Club Lisbon [link]

In these contexts, the river operates not as subject but as methodological framework — foregrounding walking, deep mapping, hydro-infrastructural awareness, and relational publishing as tools for ecological thought.

Production / outcomes

The project resulted in:

• Exhibitions:
— Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges (Borough Road Gallery, London)
— Publishing as Watery Strategy (FINITA Project, Lisbon);

• Publications:
— Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges: Prompts for Transitory States of Being
— Follow Y/Our River: A Manual for Deep Mapping in the Lower Lea Valley
— editorial texts under the Lea-minal Edges framework;

• Performative activation:
— Hḗrā: Performing The Book (Borough Road Gallery);

• Pedagogical expansion through workshops and the Books of Water series (Totally Thames Festival, Cody Dock).

The publications function not as documentation but as mobile research devices — assembling prompts, images, and spatial reflections into iterative forms of riverine thinking.

From Practice to Manifesto

Follow Y/Our River constitutes a key site within msdm’s evolving framework of ecological publishing and more-than-human mediation.

The river operates as both subject and structure — modelling slowness, circulation, accumulation, and permeability. Through walking, deep mapping, and editorial experimentation, the project enacts:

• slowness as epistemology;
• publishing as relational infrastructure;
• mediation as ecological co-presence.

Rather than stabilising the river into narrative, the project maintains it as dynamic process — a continuous unfolding across landscape, memory, and page.

→ Read the msdm manifesto

Selected Exhibitions

Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges
Borough Road Gallery, London, May 2023

Publishing as Watery Strategy
FINITA Project, Imago Gallery, Lisbon, January 2024

Selected Publications

Follow Y/Our River: A Manual for Deep Mapping in the Lower Lea Valley
msdm publications + road less travelled press

Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges: Prompts for Transitory States of Being
msdm publications + road less travelled press

Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges
Borough Road Gallery, London, May 2023
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Publishing as Watery Strategy - The work of paula roush and msdm publications
CURATOR: Susana Paiva | FINITA
GALLERY: IMAGO, Lisbon
DATE: 25-27 January 2024
[more]