Jelmer Teunissen
Explore Lab
muddying the waters: wetland communisation in deltaic ruins
In an era of errant climate change, the dredging of the Nieuwe Waterweg and Nieuwe Maas to accommodate industry and trade dangerously exposes Rotterdam to flooding; the conurbation is simultaneously a primary infrastructure and sacrifice zone. Yet the dredging industry has largely escaped the disruptive antagonism of activism. Tracing the structuring of deltaic power—which maintains a delta in place of an estuary—in the politics of the polder—in which control over the population and environment is co-constitutively produced—it appears that local elites’ vested interests in maintaining this infrastructure protect it from calls for its decommissioning. In speculatively fabulating the return of the channel to estuarine conditions through sabotage of the local dredging industry, the project proposes the transformation-through-occupation of a Boskalis site for the transhipment of sand at the Esch, Rotterdam East, into an institute for radical wetland cultures: a site of insurgent social reproduction that prefigures an autonomous wetland culture.