Abstract

Our five-country LIMINALWATER consortium (Portugal, United Kingdom, France, Austria and Croatia) will analyse the role of liminal waterway countercultures within two intersecting crises: Europe’s largely imaginary crisis of diversification and its very real ecological crisis. Countercultures emerge in Europe’s liminal waterways as a response to these two crises and provide models of resilience against them. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water - figuratively or literally - has been central to ways in which communities, artists, activists and municipal actors have re-appropriated post-colonial, post-fascist and post-socialist urban and natural space and place-based memory. We deploy historical, literary, spatial and ethnographic methodologies to explore these sites of cultural production and conviviality. Focusing on forgotten or peripheral fresh- and saltwater points of resistance to our twin crises, our cases - some historical and some contemporary - are located in the Atlantic riverports of Faro and Liverpool, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille, Algiers and the Balkans, and the riverine network linking central Europe to the Aegean and Balkans. The project will work with our Associate Partners - Sciaena (a Portuguese grassroots environmental NGO), the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) and the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka (PPMHP).

Team