Brackish Practices starts from the Scheldt estuary: a tidal landscape where fresh and salt water meet and where the boundary between land and water is constantly shifting. The estuary is an important habitat for plants, fish, birds, and micro-organisms, but also a place where many people live and work and where economic, ecological, and political interests intersect. Due to sea-level rise and climate change, this territory is under increasing pressure.
Niel de Vries explores how we might learn to live with the estuary differently. He starts from the idea that care for this territory does not arise solely through policy or technical knowledge, but also through embodied experience. For this reason, he works with situated fieldwork. He enters the estuary to learn from what happens on site in collaboration with scientists and other stakeholders.
Based on this fieldwork, Niel de Vries develops Scheldt Assemblies: public forms of social organization in which residents, researchers, policymakers, and artists come together. These Assemblies center on collectively experiencing the estuary and create space to reimagine relationships between stakeholders. He develops wearable accessories that make insights from fieldwork physically tangible and open up ways to engage with more-than-human perspectives.
The research results in excursions, Scheldt Assemblies, and a publication, and aims to contribute to new ways of living with water.
