To conspire with the river. Memories of Sabina Holzer’s riverhood.
Anne Faucheret 


with Ailton Krenak, Litó Walkey, Jack Hauser, Sabina Holzer, Boris Hauf, Alix Eynaudi, Agnes Schneidewind, Oisín Ó Manacháin, Gravenhurst, Astrida Neimanis, Stacy Alaimo, monchoachi, Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kompromat, Marisol de la Cadena, Isabelle Stengers and many more.

The times we’re living in are expert at creating absences: sapping the meaning of life from society and the meaning of experience from life. This absence of meaning generates stringent intolerance toward anyone still capable of taking pleasure from simply being alive, from dancing, from singing. There’s still a whole constellation of little groups of people who dance, sing, make it rain.
– Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, 2019

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crying rivers exist; clanking, curling,
crawling; crying rivers exist;
crying rivers, corners, cascading, the cerebrospinal
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dancers exist, disappearings, and driftwood;
floods exist, and dryness, and dryness;
sediment, fossil, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death
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echoed reading exists, pouring, pushing;
resistance and aquatic wings exist;
orphans and seahorses exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
interrupting exists; antlers, antennas,
branches, closeness, imprintings exist;
horse’s hairs, sponges, and wet suits
exist, and the carrying, the carrying
– Litó Walkey, Poem, 2025

I.

April 11th, 6 pm, Vienna, Reindorgasse, Eindorf.

I enter Eindorf through a small glass door and find myself in a space that is singularly unspectacular, disparately but delicately and precisely staged. Shapes, materials, textures and assemblages punctuate the space and accentuate its architectural configuration, while delineating a path, inviting me to move through it. To the left of the entrance, I encounter a desk with research materials, samples, maps as well as bottles and vials filled with water. In front, eroded branches, delicately bound together by blue strings and twigs, lean on the wall and form a fragile composition—a sculpture, maybe an offering. Next to it, a piece of white cloth hangs from the ceiling. It is held tight by a blue tape, and water drips steadily from the bundle into a spherical jar—a fishbowl—placed on the floor below—a sculpture and a sound piece, maybe an experiment of capillarity.

The installation continues in the adjoining room—equipped with a kitchenette and opening onto both the street through bay windows and the backyard. Filled with dispersed elements, hybrid assemblages and moving bodies—it exudes a strange atmosphere, combining living room, study room, workplace, exhibition, and stage. Stretched on a wire and secured by many colorful clothespins, a piece of white fabric divides and structures the space, creating a mirror effect with the wet counterpart in the other room and announcing the ubiquitous dimension of the art piece to come. A desk with a yellow tabletop and metal legs displays a rock sample in a small transparent plastic bag, two roots (or branches), a rusty and twisted metal rod, printed paper sheets, and a green watering can—hanging like a mobile from a side. A couch made of wood and bamboo is covered from seat to backrest with printed or handwritten sheets, books, drawings, illustrations of river basins, silkscreen prints, notes, poems, and scientific data charts—preventing from sitting on it. Images of swimmers inspired by prehistoric rock paintings are applied to the windows—swimming and floating in the air. Strips of twisted paper tape are placed here and there on the walls and on the floor—as leftovers, maybe decoration. A heavy woven rug with geometric patterns is adorned with a precarious sculpture of mysteriously aligned sponges and has transformed into a little space of celebration. Other rugs seem to just have been casually thrown down.

The elements, images, objects, materials, fossils, bodies, beings, and traces are organized by dispersion, aggregation, repetitions, echoes, and symmetries. The space is treated in movements of expansion, condensation and concentration. The resulting environment has been evidently shaped by research, care, choreography, and many stories. It triggers different senses, arises curiosity and awakens polysemic associations. It invites investigation as much as caution. It leads me and the other guests to walk around, to move forward or backward, to look up or bend down, to take a look at the assemblages, to linger over incongruous details—a watering can nozzle attached to the end of a branch, a small altar placed on a water meter—, to pick up the texts, to read the drawings, and then to find a place along the walls, on the floor, or on the seats provided.

II.

Again and again we listen to the river. We hear its song.
The water carries memories. Of the land, of time.
We touch the edges and are touched by them.
From lushed by rivers, we want to learn from the water.
From the flow. The waves. The horizontal and vertical branches. From the transitions, the living,
from those who passed away. Witnessing water roots growing on soaked surfaces through touch,
we braid dances and words. Our bodies do not belong to us, they are intertwined,
part of each other and the living space. We practice cultivating what we have in common
and what is different. We practice trust. Tributaries that we are,
we come together from our familiar river land,
bringing our gifts and attachment to share, celebrate and dream.
We let them become foreign. Often on the threshold, l
ingering, leaking, moving, being moved, waving, whispering, weeping;
full of desires, memories, hopes, and gratitude. In the midst of how crazy we make this world, we connect, practice, and invite a community to come.
– Sabina Holzer, riverhood, 2025

The prelude to the piece stretches out with the ripples and inflections of electronic music, without ever becoming awkward, as the four performers in diving suits are already there to welcome us and take care of us, offer us water, or engage in conversation with us. From the outset, we are part of the whole scenery and not mere audience members.

Set to a low volume, the electro acoustic live music encourages us to speak softly and pay close attention to ambient sounds—water dripping, objects rubbing against each other, tape rustling. Then, it is through the modulation of sound texture that the piece begins. The music stops and the sound-movements produced by the performers fill the space. A* fills an orange watering can at the tap, pours some of the water into a jar from a certain height to make noise. They then lie on their back to make it gurgle by blowing into its nozzle, slowly, for a long time—transforming the utensil’s fragment into an instrument’s mouthpiece. Later, they gargle with water in their mouth. Ag* dips printed sheets of paper into a jar of water and then applies them to the glass surfaces. The water makes them simply adhere. To realize this task, the performer crosses the whole room in their gardener boots, which squeak and clack gently. They repeat the action several times. O* stretches adhesive tape across the space, drawing a diagonal line one meter above the ground. They emphasize the sound produced by stretching the roll and rubbing their fingers along the tape. The tape divides the space but does not separate it: the line is immediately crossed, from below, by one of the performers, then later by another. At the same time, S*slowly pulls the hanging white piece of cloth together and writes in the air enigmatically with their arms. 

The performers walk on the ground as much as they glide across it. They swim vertically and horizontally. They touch surfaces as they sink into the depths. They dance the monumental as well as the infra-mince. They can be fast or very slow. They are at work while dancing, carrying out tasks that evoke collecting, surveying (French: arpentage), measuring, strolling, walking, swimming, resting, maintaining, caring—readymade activities that are diverted, magnified, or, conversely, trivialized in the choreography. The intersections of trajectories, the interactions between bodies that rest, whisper, read, touch, push, take notes, create an atmosphere where transformation and transmission—in both the physical and metaphorical sense—are central. With them porosity and fluidity come along. Are they divers, shell collectors, underwater geologists, hydrographers, wreck rescuers, whale guides, mermaid ghosts?

It’s getting darker
And I’m still swimming
It hits me again
I’m getting deeper
And I’m still swimming
It hits me again
And I am never frightened
No, I am never ashamed
And you will never understand
The lengths I go to light your way
(…)
The depths I sink to light your way
– Gravenhurst, The Diver, 2014

The objects gathered, the texts collected, the images summoned, and the processes performed relate to water, its omnipresence and its indispensability—yet they don’t stay at simple representation nor figuration. riverhood explores the workings of water, its dynamics and its power, its paths and its embodiments, its temporalities, its teachings, its imaginations, and its memories. The torrent that carves out a valley, the rain that trickles down rocks, the rivers that carry branches, the streams that erode stones into pebbles, that transport plastic bags, bicycles, and the dead. Water that flows through pipes to quench thirst or carry away waste. Water that ravages and destroys, in flash floods and mudslides. Water that flows through a watering can and feeds plants. Water that wets fabrics to wash them. Water that surrounds the skin to temper it. Water that protects the bodies that inhabit it, welcomes those who move in it. Water that is a chemical element that binds one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms into an almost perfect tetrahedron. Water that traverses inner membranes to enrich the blood and make up the cells and the organs. Water that composes the large part of all organic bodies. Water as a source of life and death. Water as a deity. Water as recipient of ritualized thankfulness. Water as common good, protected, managed, distributed, made accessible. Water as struggle. Water as a means for people to negotiate how they live together. Water as a protector and a threat. Water as body-territory, nature-culture, subject-object, past-future, and: common denominator. riverhood and the research of which it is a temporary crystallization sets up experiments, practices, methods, and speculations to be shared and passed over in order to reinvest an emotional and ontological closeness to water and bodies of water.

III.

We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding
of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition.
As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies:
I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation.
The space between ourselves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea,
yet also closer than our own skin – the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling through us, just pausing as this bodily thing we call “mine”.
Water is between bodies and of bodies,
before us and beyond us but also very presently this body, too.
Our comfortable categories of thought begin to dissolve.
Water entangles our bodies in relations of care, debt, gift, theft, complicity, difference and relation.
– Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, 2012

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As we know, we are bodies of water –fluid systems shaped by and connected to water. From our primordial and embryonic origins, water has and continues to shape us. Even our bones are shaped by and contain water. We are carrying many forms of fluid through our bodies’ pathways: blood in our veins & arteries, cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and spine, saliva in our mouths, urine in our bladders, and liquid cushions for the spheres of our eyes. Much like rivers, vital information is transported by these fluids. (…)
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Stones, too, are an ancient form of condensed water. As water contains memory, so do stones. So do the stones on the riverbed. Water shapes rocks, and rocks shape rivers – providing shelter, spawning grounds, and shaping water’s flow. We each found a rock that resonated with us, we gave it a dedication and placed it back into the river as an offering.
– Litó Walkey, Wienfluss stories, 2025

We are all bodies of water. As assemblage of organic matter, of carbon and water indeed, human bodies are coming from, connected to, and flowing into other more-than-human bodies of water. Water permeates the world at all levels, from the ocean to rivers to cells to molecules. Water transgresses what is defined as corporeal borders. Water helps thinking beyond human individuality and interiority. Water connects the “outside” and the “inside”, the “one” and the “many”, the “past” and the “present”. Water travels through time. Water reconciles life and “non-life”.

A* and O* rummage noisily through a plastic bag patched up with tape—or stir its contents to create a slightly unpleasant sense of urgency—which is defused by the arrival of Ag* and then S*, who crawls over to join them. The performers‘ bodies embrace, intertwine, stick and clump together, aggregate and merge. The constellation of interlaced limbs becomes an organized ensemble. The colors, textures and surfaces of the diving suits emphasize the impression of a haptic fusion. The singular bodies morph into a large plural body, at the same time fragmented, partial and whole. Energy flows circulate through it, and air currents pass through it. External gravity as well as internal pressures make it warp and bend. The large plural body is a mass body, a dynamic body, and a metabolic body. A body that breathes, digests, transforms, disintegrates, and recomposes itself. A body that arises beyond all kinds of binaries—singular/plural, male/female, natural/technological, objective/subjective, active/passive. A body that cannot or does not want to be imagined solely as one. Following its own mutability and hybridity, refusing to belong to any species, to respect any scale or to be subjected to any time, it performs extended, contorted or inflected gestures, speaks to the audience with many voices or returns to itself, dancing inward. The performers merge with the river. They are the river. As Clarice Lispector « animalized » herself, they « riverize » themselves.

Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality,
in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,
underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human
is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.”
It makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background
for the exploits of the human, since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin.
Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the “environment,”
which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings, with their own needs, claims, and actions.
By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human.
– Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature, 2008

Suddenly, a great sliding movement—pushing with almost tectonic force—is triggered and carried out by the sixteen limbs of the large plural body. Blankets, bodies, cushions, branches, belts, rugs, paper, seats—everything in its path is swept along and pushed away by a now fragmented large plural body. Human and more-than-human forces intermingle. The movement upsets the balance of the environment, brings unexpected entropy, and disturbs, encroaches upon, and displaces the seating bodies from the audience. It expands the stage towards the edges of the space, like a large wave at high tide that laps at the towels of sleepy bathers and rouses them from their torpor. It trespasses the safe separation between the ones who look and the ones who perform and the audience gets (gently) caught amidst a stormy event.

The difference between cartography and cartopoetics
is that one is a writing of places by men and in the eyes of humans,
while the other is a listening by humans to the word of places,
which is often confused with the word of the gods.
One is a prescription, the other an interview
(in Creole palé ba’y, both to speak with and to speak for).
As a result, cartography often appears as an oblivion of place and the world it sets up,
in many ways a subterfuge, a disposition (placed by separating, putting in order),
a superimposed image of human discourse rather than a composition,
when cartopoetics is all about the near and the very near.
The former reflects and betrays an obsession with appropriation,
delimitation, demarcation and development,
all of which are supposed to guarantee security,
conservation and „enhancement“,
while the latter calls upon places
in its speech to listen to them sing.
– monchoachi, LaKouZémi #1, 2007

The curated disparity is turned into chaotic dispersion and calls for a different way of being an audience—not detached and distant but involved and entangled. A telephone rings, and the performers immediately stop dancing, mutating their choreographic moves into casual conversational gestures. This signals the end of the first part of the show—performative, experiential and associative—and the beginning of another part—dialogic and discursive. The piece is organized sequentially, rhythmed by the unregular alternation between what Sabina Holzer calls vignettes—“aesthetically condensed and situational narratives”—and tributaries—which focus on presenting the materials and research gathered. The aesthetic proposal is followed by a genuine exchange where the audience is invited to interact with the collected resources, to share stories and experiences about the river, and to grasp the artists‘ working methods – combining multidisciplinary experiential research, embodied mapping, choreographic learning, and polyphonic translation. For that, the artists worked with philosophical, poetic, and scientific texts, ranging from reflections on hydrofeminism, animist cosmovisions, anthropological accounts on traditional watery rituals, reports recognizing the legal personhood of rivers, or chemical analyses of the composition of the Danube’s water. Of all the bodies of water mentioned, it is the Danube River—particularly its Viennese section—and the Wienfluss—a river flowing into a branch of the Danube—that the artists have explored, smelled, observed, documented, listened to, collected from, sung for. And through which they have remembered and speculated.

Perhaps invocation is the mode of operation of the performance artist
who is an accomplice, not the police. In the mode of invocation the performance,
the social rehearsal of attention, the plotting of attention, is disrupted.
In invocation this disruption does not occur simply by substituting
one form of attention for another. Rather in this operation of the accomplice,
invocation disrupts the way attention itself is formed and experienced.
Invocation focuses attention on what cannot yet be attended to.
It conjures not another attention but the social conditions of attention in order
to put these social conditions themselves in the category of the ‚as if‘.
By placing attention itself in question, by invoking that which cannot hold attention,
be called to attention, that which stays at the level of intention,
that which remains preliminary to plot, premature to plot, not inattentive but pre-attentive,
invocation opens up the social making of attention itself to other uses,
other experiments. This opening up is what makes radical sociality possible,
a rehearsal of another way to make attention collectively, to attend together to another world.
The accomplice disrupts not the attention to plotting but the plotting of attention itself.
Invocation unforms attention to attend to the not yet seen, the not yet experienced,
the not yet rehearsed. The invocation of the performance artist is
the rehearsal of the conspiracy without a plot.
– Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, A conspiracy without a plot, 2013

The audience’s attention is never directed in a single direction, nothing is ever told unilaterally, and the dramaturgy follows intense dispersion. The audience is guided and lost at the same time in the choreographic assemblage proposed by the piece – which is a choreographic walk, an exhibition, a performance, and a reading at once. We are in the midst of what is happening, sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes concerned, sometimes disturbed, sometimes touched, sometimes challenged, but constantly forced to negotiate and gauge our own reception, our own position. The coexistence of many modes of going with and blending in companions-resources, material experiences, and situated knowledge—as well as of relating to the multitude-audience—counters the colonization of thought with modern scientific rationalities and theoretical abstractions. riverhood departs from a shift in perception, away from Western anthropocentrism that opposes the (“civilized”) human subject and the (“natural”) more-than-human entities, deeming them as mere resource for human exploitation. It attempts to transcend normative and brutal binaries like nature/culture, object/subject, ratio/emotion, science/art, universal/situated, inside/outside to acknowledge all-encompassing porosity and ontological inseparability.

What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imagined each existent
(human and more-than-human) not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces,
but rather as singular expressions of each and every other existent as well as
of the entangled whole in/as which they exist?
What if, instead of looking to particle physics for models of devising more scientific
or critical analysis of the social we turned to its most disturbing findings
– such as nonlocality (as an epistemological principle) and virtuality (as an ontological descriptor)
– as poetical descriptors, that is, as indicators of the impossibility
of comprehending existence with the thinking tools t
hat cannot but reproduce separability and its aids,
namely determinacy and sequentiality?
– Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability, 2016

IV.

Each vignette begins with the gestures with which the previous one ended. After a few minutes, the grand movement resumes, almost entirely reconfiguring the two spaces in a swirling motion that suddenly petrifies. This is the beginning of the second vignette. The accompanying soundscape is generated from recordings of the Wienfluss, which were broken down into tiny sound segments and fed into a generator that then processes and distorts them synthetically. Nothing moves until the music stops. When the music stops, bodies move again, but differently. The performers go back to their human envelopes and dispatch in both rooms, for now taking distance from each other—spatially as well as choreographically. Ag* turns on the overhead projector, which magnifies the images of swimmers printed on transparent film into a landscape—as if we would go back to the cave age. A* carefully builds—without any fulfilled virtuosity—a sculpture-offering made of odds and ends and branches. It is time to repair—or rebuild—otherwise.

Ich bin ein riesiger Berg
Ich bin ein Stein
Ich bin ein Stein unter einem Stein unter einem Stein
Ich bewege mich so langsam
Dass ich unbeweglich ausseh
Furchtbar, Wildbach, Bäche von meinen Tränen
Niemand hört es, wenn ich schreie
– Kompromat, Niemand, 2019

A lament begins. Using the corner of a room as a resonating chamber, S* and then Ag* cry and sing, echoing each other and modulating their voices in ways that are sometimes shrill, sometimes guttural, sometimes cavernous, sometimes simply: animal. The chorus is at once a lamentation, a mourning chant and an incantation. In riverhood, the voices chanting, reading, whispering, stammering, stuttering, sometimes words, sometimes sounds, always poems, are instilled rather than imposed. Sounds and words carried by the voices of the performers or lingering in the limbo of notes taken on paper, are all-pervading but never dominant. In the tributaries, they are means to communicate—but neither to chat, nor to tell one story. They open pathways into manifold sources and speculations. In the vignettes, words and sentences sometimes escape regular signification to become something more complex than semiotic signs. They don’t try to make sense at all costs. They speak the unknown. They pass through mouths and bodies, traverse bodies who borrowed them from others. They bounce off other bodies and surfaces, materialize the presence of bodies in space, next to other bodies, close or very close. They make connections, acknowledge bonds, cherish relationality, instead of categorizing reality, disseminating knowledge, choosing meanings, norming behaviors.

When words leave our bodies and become material.
When they sweep into the light, they are still anchored in the silence,
in obscure darkness. ‘To write, you have to be humble’, says Hélène Cixous,
‘because the world overwhelms us. The world is unknown.
We live in the unknown. We cannot say anything about tomorrow.
That is why we write into the darkness.’ Writing saturates surfaces from there.
Like a mole, it raises bulges. Writing is always material.
Always connected with the earth, with something from our planet.
Clay, iron, aluminium, silicone, rare earths. There they rest, the ghostly traces of future words.
The layers and watermarks, the invisible rivers, the trajectories,
rills in stone, digital points of light on the screen, ink on paper.
Like this I enter into a contact with the world that shapes us above all.
It is perhaps this contact, this material assurance, of oneself,
via the encounter with the other, becoming other, that drives this search,
this form of touch, again and again. Cixous says: ‘writing is my double’.
– Sabina Holzer, Record of liminal thoughts and other movements #2, 2022

Sometimes they soothe and repair. As does the entire piece. Poetic and textual, choreographic and sonic scores are summoned as treatments and counter spells—for the performer’s bodies receiving them, for the audience, for the space, for the river. We live under the spell of a powerful enchantment—the spell of capitalism and liquid modernity—that is presenting infernal alternatives and destroying world(s). riverhood tries to break this spell, by invoking other worlds within this world, testing the limits of formatted language, pushing the imagination beyond its usual boundaries, and conspiring together.

How to end instrumentalist relations to rivers? How to listen to rivers? How to look at rivers under the surface? How to re-imagine our relation to rivers? Or rather: How to think like a river? How to become a river? riverhood works as a polyphonic, synaesthetic and choreographic assemblage, always reconfiguring itself. riverhood creates scenarios gathering diverse human and more-than-human bodies and forces, stories and knowledge, practices and rituals. riverhood encourages the reclaiming of being otherwise, the building of new collectives, the forging of new connections, ways of future cohabitation. riverhood is a practice, an ethics, a po(i)etics offering ways to de-petrify and casting counterspells to outward the fear of ontological inseparation.

I am calling the anthropo-not-seen: the world-making process
through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make
themselves through the division between humans and nonhumans
—nor do they necessarily conceive the different entities in their assemblages
through such a division—are both obliged into that distinction 
and exceed it. Dating from the fifteenth century in what became the Americas,
the anthropo-not-seen was, and continues to be, the process of destruction of these worlds 
and the impossibility of such destruction.
It might very well represent the first historical apocalypse:
the will to end many worlds that produced the one-world world and its excesses.
– Marisol de la Cadena, Uncommoning Nature, e-flux #65, 2015

Learning to compose will need many names, not a global one,
the voices of many peoples, knowledges, and earthly practices.
It belongs to a process of multifold creation,
the terrible difficulty of which would be foolish and dangerous to underestimate
but which it would be suicidal to think of as impossible.
– Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, 2015