‘Between the water & I’ explores the formation and separation of the Brabant region, questioning: What signifies ‘Brabant’ as a region now? What happens to the ecology when a land is separated? What are the latent traces connecting Northern Brabant to the former Southern? Today, Dutch farmers are moving with their livestock to Belgium, where fewer restrictions regarding nitrogen emissions from livestock farming are enforced. Meanwhile, Brussels is trying to acquire land from its neighboring regions to increase its agricultural production. This situation generates speculation about the ecological causes of heavy agriculture. If livestock farming limitations can force these regions to interact and reconnect again. And the speculation narrates itself on water, the Dommel River, which has been connecting and transferring aquatic information between two regions all along. Streaming as a memory flux of human activities on land, digging, grubbing, manuring.

 

          Nurtured by this pollution, algae excessively grows and blooms, visualizing the altering nutrient levels in the water. It becomes the essential tool, a by-product of the chain of relations, the essence for unfolding the excessive manipulation the project is problematizing. The project generates itself as a set of tools to confront ‘the human’ with their cause of corruption in the land. The role of unveiling this narrative is re-attributed to algae, empowering its role while materializing it. Consequences of human actions on the land are being revealed and performed by following the steps of the art of paper marbling, the artificially mesmerizing reflection of the algal bloom on water bodies. Thus, the complex chain of relations: biological, geographical, and political, is embedded and captured as an aestheticized artifact.