I’ve seen the Mississippi. That’s muddy water. I’ve seen the Saint Lawrence. That’s crystal water. However the Thames is liquid historical past.
—John Burns, quoted within the Day by day Mail, January 25, 1943
Within the higher left quadrant of Minnesota, a small winding brook and its effervescent waters kind the beginnings of a journey from north to south, catching streams and tributaries alongside its observe by means of the guts of North America towards the Gulf of Mexico. The title given to this huge system fabricated from greater than 100,000 waterways is the Mississippi River, a riparian sweep with a drainage basin touching roughly 1.2 million sq. miles, or 40 % of the continental United States. With sand and silt ever flowing towards the river’s mouth, a wild wetland of marshes, swamps, and bayous reigns, turning stable land into sponge within the huge community of alluvial floodplains referred to as the Mississippi Delta. Just below 100 miles from the Mississippi’s mouth, the river takes a sudden flip southward, snaking east after which north in a ultimate return to its southeasterly course. On this crescent-shaped curvature between river, lake, and gulf lies New Orleans, named after Philippe I, duc d’Orléans by the French Canadian naval officer and colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In his correspondence with Philippe, Bienville described this magnificent system of watercourses as “full of a mud as deep as its oceanbed” but “unmistakably Divine” for its navigational and industrial potential. By royal decree, Bienville was granted two parcels of land for the institution of a “new France on this riverside”—land financed by France’s first colonial buying and selling company, the Mississippi Firm, and cleared and labored by the primary enslaved Africans in Louisiana.
Colonization and enslavement have marked the course of the Mississippi’s historic destiny, forming an entanglement between the pure situations of the panorama and the voracious efforts to order the land and extract from it at any value. The institution of Black subjugation and enslavement because the guiding ideas of the Mississippi Delta’s growth commenced with the first-generation European settlers, who constructed no finish of plantations alongside River Highway, or the “German Coast,” within the early eighteenth century, as a part of a systemic effort to harness the Mississippi’s distinctive qualities and assets for white landowning rights and income. This undertaking required many years of collaboration on the micro and macro ranges, with parish directors and Washington pundits, militias of engineers and surveyors, industrial titans, landowners, attorneys, and firms united within the deregulation, mapping, draining, and domestication of the Mississippi Valley. The abstraction of the panorama into parcels of extractive capital instantiated slave-trading and slaveholding because the political, financial, cultural, and ethical “mud and mortar” of the American undertaking within the decrease Delta.
These histories and environmental legacies stay seen everywhere in the panorama of New Orleans. They’re seen and felt within the imposing framework of the ancien régime grid, which because the metropolis’s founding has divided and segregated wealthy and poor, free from unfree, white and Black, collaborating with the networks of reservoirs, levees, pumping techniques, and public riverfronts constructed alongside the sting of the Mississippi to maintain the sides of it in line. Some plantation complexes the place sugarcane was as soon as harvested and processed nonetheless stand alongside the riverbanks of River Highway (with just a few remodeled into websites of public training). Within the house between them, petrochemical refineries financed by Formosa, Shell, and ExxonMobil gentle the skies with carcinogens and poisonous smoke above and fluorescent sludge beneath, their vegetation constructed on former plantation websites, ancestral burial grounds of Indigenous tribes, and cemeteries of the enslaved. The need to squeeze and strangle the land, the river, and the Black and brown peoples who dwell and work there goes on, improvising anew throughout time and house.
And but, round this moon-formed assembly of water and land, a panorama has come into being by means of a constellation of resistances to those methods of management and occupation. Actions and struggles in opposition to the tides of commodification persist within the pure and human worlds, each refusing to abide, seeping into the techniques created to quell them. That is affirmed every time the Mississippi River spills over its banks. As Toni Morrison rightly reminds us, “they straightened out the Mississippi River in locations, to make room for homes and livable acreage. Sometimes the river floods these locations … it’s remembering. Remembering the place it was. All water has an ideal reminiscence and is ceaselessly attempting to get again to the place it was.” Additionally it is instantiated in every recorded account of marronage, a everlasting and customary modality of resistance within the Delta wetlands, which turned the swamps into radical websites of commerce and kinship that sustained Black life and training, saved households collectively, and granted house for escape from enslavement. Revolts gathered up smaller reverberations of insurrection into seen and communal resistance, as on the night time of January 8, 1811, when a bunch of greater than 5 hundred Black folks marched from LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish towards New Orleans alongside River Highway. Armed with shovels and axes—the instruments of their labor—they shaped a thick cloud of safety behind their chief Charles Deslondes, an enslaved Creole of colour. The historian Walter Johnson’s account of the 1811 revolt lends names and lands to those that participated: amongst their group have been males named Cupidon, Al-Hassan, Janvier, and Diaca; some have been American-born, African, or Creole; some hailed from Congo or the Akan; some have been Christian, others Muslim. Every have been organized into firms that mirrored their origins, which collectively, representing the worldwide stretch of cultures and communities violently destroyed by the transatlantic slave commerce, have been “devoted to the one goal of its overthrow.” Throughout their journey, they hid within the deep recesses of swamp and river, harnessing their labyrinthine waterways—locations they knew and understood higher than did their enemies—for defense. The muddy waters of the Mississippi maintain these diasporic histories nonetheless; like all rivers, their edges are by no means nonetheless.
Far throughout the Atlantic Ocean lies the 205-mile size of the River Thames, which rises and flows west from Thames Head in Gloucestershire towards Tilbury in Essex and Gravesend in Kent, ultimately spilling into the North Sea. Passing Oxford, Studying, and Slough, it cuts thick by means of the guts of London, providing drainage for England’s lowlands throughout the best way. Shorter, shallower and gentler than the mighty Mississippi, the Thames’s historical past runs lengthy—it was a catalyst for the group and growth of Europe. With the Roman founding of Londinium in A.D. 47 at a key crossing level over the Thames, the town on the river established itself as a serious port and route for home commerce and change, with barges traversing throughout a system of locks carrying timber, livestock, wool, and meals from the fifteenth century ahead. By the early phases of empire, the institution of products exchanges alongside the riverbank made the Thames a major participant within the group of world capitalism and the transatlantic slave commerce, starting with the founding and constitution of the Royal African Firm in 1672 by King Charles II, which formed a star-shaped community of transport between the west coast of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A lust for gold shortly shape-shifted to a lust for the land, waterways, and other people inhabiting these sources, and inevitable competitors and extractive greed would comply with as England labored to construct an industrial monopoly over the world. Banks on the Thames lent credit score that financed the promoting and commodification of human beings in colonial empires internationally, earlier than and after 1808. Uncooked cotton and sugarcane, picked and processed by slaves in New Orleans, discovered their option to the exchanges in Liverpool, Bristol, and London by way of naval applied sciences and water routes invented by British civil servants. The Thames and its connective community of waterways was ever shifting, pushing, and circulating items and human beings by drive and by alternative into, throughout, and past Nice Britain.
Across the curving bends of the River Thames and its tributaries, explosions of resistance have adopted and shaped, too—shifting, seizing, and interrupting the panorama and its story, the aim and historical past of a spot. Extra lately, on June 6, 2020, simply twelve days following the homicide of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Londoners took to the streets in the course of a pandemic underneath the banner of Black Lives Matter. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the protesters edged their manner alongside the Thames from Parliament Sq. towards Saint James Park and ultimately to the U.S. Embassy in Vauxhall, in protest of incarceration and killing of Black folks by the police; they paraded in entrance of the key seats of presidency and the establishments which have traditionally profited from slavery and its accompanying industries. In Bristol a day later, on June 7, 2020, an 1895 bronze statue of the British-born service provider and transatlantic slave dealer Sir Edward Colson was toppled into the River Avon (a serious tributary of the Thames) after many years of efforts, in recognition of Colson’s profitable participation within the slave commerce and the town’s subsequent whitewashing of his legacy as a philanthropist. Questions of accountability, transparency, and historic awakening stay the calling of all activists dedicated to liberation struggles.
One of many phrases that the artist Helen Cammock makes use of to explain her apply is seepage—a gradual however regular escape or drainage of 1 factor into one other, a cycle of motion from side to side akin to the dances of a tide. Linking her course of to the situation of water—as her work is ceaselessly increasing and leaking into and out of many materials genres and modes—Cammock factors to the animus on the coronary heart of her undertaking: motion, whether or not historic, political, geographical, or cultural. Discovering and nurturing the websites of shift and motion—the locations the place they arrive into contact, pose gaps, interrupt, kind connections, grow to be liquid—stays Cammock’s strongest methodological device each contained in the archives and within the materialization of her movies and writing. Harnessing the ability of water, the churn of historical past, and the spirit of reminiscence that haunts them each, Cammock seeps and soaks into historic document, providing and opening house for the circulate and traces of the previous to hyperlink, return, and keep in mind.

Until in any other case famous, all photos are stills from Helen Cammock, I Will Hold My Soul, Siglio/Rivers/CAAM, 2023. Photographs courtesy of the artist and publishers. All rights reserved.

Collaged archival supplies utilized in Helen Cammock’s I Will Hold My Soul, Siglio/Rivers/CAAM, 2023. Picture courtesy of the artist, the publishers, and the Amistad Analysis Heart.
Helen Cammock is a British artist who makes use of movie, pictures, print, textual content, tune, and efficiency to look at mainstream historic and up to date narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and energy, and poverty and vulnerability. She was a joint recipient of the 2019 Turner Prize and has exhibited and carried out her work in galleries and museums internationally.
Jordan Amirkhani serves because the deputy director and curator of the Rivers Institute for Up to date Artwork & Thought. Her latest curatorial initiatives embrace Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye and the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Up to date. Her writing and criticism have garnered her a 2017 Inventive Capital/Andy Warhol Basis Quick-Type Writing Grant and three nominations for the Rabkin Prize in arts journalism.