CAROLINE BRÜNEN

It Is the Water Flowing that Makes the Sound (2022)

10 photographs, text

The protagonist of this work is the river Rhine. The photographs show structures that extract the Rhine's bank filtrate, transport it under the city, clean it, and release it back into the river. In Cologne, drinking water is obtained from groundwater, which is also fed by Rhine water. The treated wastewater is released back into the Rhine without removing residues from medications. Due to the ongoing drought, the Rhine is additionally affected by recurring low water levels. Unlike many places in the Global South, in Western culture we view rivers as inanimate objects: Infrastructures that serve a purpose. We thus fail to recognize that they are part of a supra-regional metabolic organism. If we apply this idea to the Rhine, it would be a living organism to which the city of Cologne parasitically docks, extracts, pollutes part of the river water, and then incompletely purifies it in an artificial kidney, the sewage treatment plant, and returns it to the river.

This project views the city as an analogy to the human body and understands urban space as a living organism that digests. Like a fungal mycelium, whose underground interconnections are only visible through the occasional appearance of its fruiting bodies, the photographs document these architectural structures designed for invisibility. The texts open up a further space for reflection: they provide insight into the artist's personal thought processes and clearly show how Western philosophy's dichotomy between culture and nature has fuelled and continues to fuel the climate crisis. The texts therefore form an integral part of the work and deal with the question of how an understanding of cyclical logics could lead to a change in perspective among human city dwellers in relation to their immediate more-than-human environment.