Liquid Cartographies: Reshaping the Banks of the Possible is a 3-day experimental gathering that will engage participants in creating the conditions to experience concepts and places in processes of constant flux. The explorations are not fixed to hard-mapped ideas of rivers, islands, or coastlines. This is not the language of finding solutions. Dominant systems of knowledge-production and dissemination have not trained humans to be fluid, to see ourselves as co-emergent with and within ecosystems of constant movement, change and fluctuation. In this gathering of persons and perspectives, from the local to the trans-local, we ask: how do our ideas about land and water shape and inform our lives and imaginations?  How might propositional thinking and playing together open up possibilities, beyond rigid frameworks that center human exceptionalism, for more fluid forms of confabulating?

Sited in Red Hook, a post-industrial waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, Liquid Cartographies offers opportunities to gather together around experimental perspectives. Red Hook is a neighborhood defined by a changing coastline, altered by colonization, industrialization, and climate change. The area’s swampy past, waterfront crime and relative remoteness has shaped the way people have inhabited and mythologized it. Associated with decades of decay, it has been described with words and phrases like desolate and haunted, the place that time forgot, and a salty town at the end of the world. And yet, Red Hook has been and continues to be a neighborhood, a place where people try to reach out beyond the divisions of the past, where people weather the challenges together, eat, drink and dance in the streets together in celebration, in grief, in protest, and acts of mutual care. It has drawn people to its rough edges because of its indeterminacy, an indeterminacy edged, once again, with change and impending development.

Co-created by ten (The Emergence Network) and Krista Dragomer, interdisciplinary artist and 15 year resident and active community member of Red Hook, Liquid Cartographies is an event with an emergent agenda based on propositions from participants (mostly local to the metropolitan area) and organizers alike. Our invitation is to work with the waters and lands of this specific neighborhood to offer place-based practices / activities / workshops / sessions in order to understand commonly held concepts – land and water – differently. We imagine sessions taking place simultaneously in a number of venues within walking distance around the area. Sessions may also happen on the move, as we walk about or hold processions, with the possibility for spontaneous, emergent propositions throughout the three days.