The Traces of Mining Activities in Riverscapes—a Lyrical and Performative Art-based Approach

This practice-based research investigates how performative time-based art can respond to the entanglements between humans and riverscapes. Beginning with broad ecological and theoretical concerns, it narrows to a specific site: the Red River in Camborne, Cornwall, UK, a waterway marked by centuries of mining activities. The Red River carries the visible traces of extraction in their striking red hue, flowing like blood and resembling a scar across the earth’s surface. They stand as witness to human industrial ambition and as bearers of ecological devastation.

Approached from the perspective of an Asian female outsider, this research examines a polluted river that has been studied by scientists but rarely by artists. It challenges anthropocentric approaches, integrating Eastern and Western ecological philosophies, including ecofeminism, hydrofeminism, Global South and Asian perspectives, to explore a new state of harmonious interaction in which humans and the riverscapes coexist. The practice employs cross-media methods to engage wider audiences, with ritual performance taking a central role. The core concept revolves around apologising to the Red River.

From this sustained practice, the thesis takes shape as a mythological guide for learning to apologise to wounded rivers. It offers a series of orienting gestures, inviting artists, researchers and communities to adapt them with care and precision in other riverscapes. In this sense, the research is designed to travel, carrying a way of attending, witnessing and making amends that can be taken up elsewhere.

The conceptual framework of the Chthulucene, articulated by Donna Haraway, provides orientation for this study. It unsettles linear narratives of progress and foregrounds relational becoming across species. Here, it is approached as an ethical call that resonates with the guide developed through practice: to listen to rivers as coinhabitants of damaged worlds, to trace their scars as shared histories, and to imagine futures grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction.

In the spirit of recognising the generative power of language and representation, I refer to the river as they, reflecting a commitment to resisting anthropocentric perspectives and recognising rivers as living, vibrant assemblages of more-than-human relations. The more-than-human here refers to organisms and life forms beyond the human, including entire ecologies, landscapes, mammals, amphibians, plants, insects, algae, and microbial communities...

This research positions itself as an intervention of ecological consciousness. It explores how experimental art-based approach can reshape perceptions, rebuild fractured relationships, and make amends for the ecological and cultural wounds inflicted upon riverscapes. By bridging theory and practice, it contributes to the ongoing discourse on more-than-human relations, offering a way of rethinking river-human interactions in the context of the Chthulucene and beyond.

Finally, I suggest that each of us carries the potential to become a walking, talking red river. Rivers bear witness to the wounds of extractivism. Walking with them becomes both an act of attention and a return to our fluid nature. Water flows through us, shaping how we live, feel, and remember. In their movements, we find echoes of ourselves, beings bound to a shared body of memory, rupture, and repair.