In the 1950s, the Rhône River was declared dead. With the development of hydroelectricity, the river changed drastically in post-war France. New canals took over the old river, dikes were built against flooding, the river was slowly dammed in the name of science and technology. Furthermore, with its fast flow and cool temperatures, the Rhône provided an ideal setting for the development of several nuclear power plants and chemical industry sites. The river became a hydraulic object, the boundaries between nature and technology slowly blurred.

The river – once the symbol of an uncontrollable force – had been conquered, but how would the river best describe itself? Inspired by Bruno Latour's The Parliament of Things, in which the philosopher argues that laws and politics should not be centered only around people, but should respond to all things and life forms, Tanja Engelberts examines the Rhône from an animistic point of view. She tries to imagine what it’s like to be a fast-flowing river, slowly filling with Anthropocene-era artifacts over a 600 kilometer stretch. A landscape steeped in chemical waste, that’s slowly disappearing due to climate change.

With a fast current, the Rhône originates in the glaciers of Switzerland, meandering to the south of France and ending in the Mediterranean Sea. Along the way, her waters absorb chemicals in the Rhône valley: sediment-carried fluoroalkyl (PFAS), radionuclides (radioactive material), plastic waste and pesticides. The sediment of the Rhône acts as a preservative; Roman artifacts over 2000 years old are still found there. For Tanja Engelberts, this silt became a symbol of the river’s power and its hidden history.

The artist made photographs from the perspective of the river itself, focusing on the meeting of water and riverbank – sometimes a natural barrier, but more often stone and concrete. On the riverbanks, Engelberts found a clay-like substance that she decided to work with, having tested it at attraction terrestre, a local ceramics studio in Arles. Where the Rhône has been subdued by hydraulic and nuclear technology, Engelberts wanted to adopt a technical and distant approach to her own way of working. Organic material and mechanical process intertwine here: the artist laser cuts photographs, creates reliefs, presses clay into them, and glazes her ceramic landscapes with clay from the Rhône.

This project was produced as a commission from FOTODOK (Utrecht, NL) and developed as a site-specific research during the art residency The Shelter (Arles, FR), with support of MIAP foundation and Stroom (The Hague, NL)