On the Impossibility of Representing a River: Live-Stream

A multitude of habitats, an economic backbone, a landscape of politics, a place of spirits and lore – there are uncountable ways to look at a river. However, many of them remain invisible in today’s cartographic depictions.

In reference to Umberto Eco’s essay On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, artists Maud Canisius and Myriel Milicevic, anthropologist and photographer Thiago da Costa Oliveira and jurist and socio-legal scholar Xenia Chiaramonte took on the challenge of drawing a map of the Danube river in the Lido area of Bratislava. The Lido is a place of conflicting interests between urban developers and river communities. How do the ways different actors look at a place influence what is represented? How do different rights to and of the river relate to each other?