A river is not a line on a map
Minty Donald and Nick Millar

During the residency we’ll be working with the River Nith’s catchment area and thinking about how the Nith and its tributaries are mapped and named.

We want to explore alternative approaches to mapping that don’t represent rivers and streams as lines. Rivers are not tidy, contained bodies of water. They ooze and seep, they change course, they spate, recede and dry up. We want to imagine rivers as temporal and seasonal, as dispersed and often invisible to humans, as living, sensorial, mobile, mutable things, as more-than-human.

How might we evoke or represent a river in ways that reflect its boundlessness, liveliness, and changeability? What might an alternative to images of rivers as channels of water, represented by lines on maps, look and feel like? How might these alternative representations usefully upset assumptions about the control and management of water? Might this influence how we live within watery landscapes?

We’re also interested in the evocative local names given to the Nith’s many tributaries, like cleuch, gutter, grain or sware. These names suggest specific physical features of a landscape and intimate relationships between water, terrain, and the people who give them names. Some of the names of the tributaries, like Smurn Gutter or Rae Grain, sound to us like characters, perhaps reinforcing that rivers are living things. We’re interested in exploring what it means to name a river or body of water. How does naming affect our relationships with things? Who gets to name something, and who or what doesn’t?