April 8, 2005
Weissman
Symposium Focuses on Water’s Role in the
World
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Mary
Miss |
Nature’s
lines aren’t nearly as exact as the lines people create;
where governments declare strict borders, nature offers tides that
move in and out, blurring the boundary between shore and water.
Boundaries like the one between water and land were one of the
subjects discussed March 31–April 2 during a symposium on
water. Scholars and artists gathered to discuss the aesthetic,
political, and environmental issues
surrounding the liquid that covers 70 percent of the planet.
Kicking off the Weissman Center symposium, titled The Place of Water
in the World: Ritual, Beauty, and the Environment, was Mary Miss, a
renowned sculptor, drafter, and environmental artist. Miss devoted much of
her talk
to the notion of challenging boundaries. Often through a water theme,
Miss has tried to answer the boundary questions contemporary artists grapple
with:
must every meeting between the built and natural environments be a
collision? Is it possible to engage an audience by allowing the viewer to
take a more
active role in the artwork? Can artists be more than commentators—can
they help shape the culture?
One of Miss’s answers is South Cove in New York City’s Battery
Park, a three-dimensional artwork with walkways and a lookout tower
that offers visitors several views of the Hudson River. Miss said South Cove
was an effort
to reintegrate Manhattan into its surroundings.
“For a long time, you couldn’t get to the water’s edge,” said
Miss, who is from New York. “I tried to imagine a way this city and
this river could be joined again.”
People who come to South Cove don’t simply experience the river leaning
over a banister, said Miss. They join it from their city perch, blurring
boundaries between the man-made and the natural; between water and land.
“You hear it, smell it, get your feet wet at high tide,” she said.
Many of Miss’s projects involve water, which she said has played an
important role in her art. Through her work she has tried to educate about
everything
from wastewater treatment to disappearing wetlands.
Other speakers illustrated thetheme of connections between the natural
and built worlds with examples of ecosystems that have been or will
be restored. In her introductory remarks Karen Remmler, codirector of Mount
Holyoke’s
Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, called for more such transformations
of “barriers of separation” into “places of meeting.”
“We must restore the joint history we as humans have with rivers,” Remmler
said.
Gay Tischbirek, the director of International Relations at Ecole d’Ingenieurs
in Sceaux, France, described a 40-year project underway to better manage the
Nile River. The project aims to transform women in Nile countries from water
carriers into water managers, by involving and training them in the region’s
water use. The project will assemble women from all the Nile basin
countries, and help them work together to achieve effective long-term water
management.
Tischbirek said the group is working with UNESCO to inform Nile basin
governments about the project.
At present, pollution and erosion represent serious threats to the
Nile and the people who use it, according to Mount Holyoke geography professor
Girma
Kebbede of Ethiopia. Kebbede was one of several speakers to discuss
the challenges facing the world’s water supplies. Another speaker,
Chinese dissident Dai Qing, described her fight against the Three Gorges
hydroelectric dam on
the Yangtze River, construction of which is underway.
Because of that dam, which will be completed in 2009, two million people
will be displaced from their homes, 13 cities dynamited, and 1,492 towns and
villages wiped out.
Dai Qing, who was jailed for ten months because of a book she published
with interviews, essays, and statements by Chinese scientists and engineers
opposed to the dam, was trained as an engineer and served as a staff
officer in the
military intelligence department of the People’s Liberation
Army.
The transition from soldier to dissident was a difficult one for
her, she said.
“We are used to obeying, to do what the boss told us we do,” she
said of people in the army.
But after a trip to Hong Kong in 1987, Dai Qing learned about the technical
problems associated with the Three Gorges Dam—information that was
not available in China, she said. When she returned home she continued to
get information
from her friends in Hong Kong, and she began talking to the engineers
involved in the project. Many, she found, were opposed to it.
Her fight against the dam began.
She gathered opinions from engineers and other experts associated with
the project for her book. Younger people were not willing to be quoted
by name, but more senior people were. The book Yangtze! Yangtze! is credited
with pressuring
the State Council to postpone the dam, and with inspiring China’s democracy
movement.
Nevertheless Dai Qing, who has been stripped of all rights except citizenship,
said the anti-dam movement failed every step of the way: first in its efforts
to cancel the project, then to postpone the project, and finally to reduce
the height of the water from 175 meters to something that would reduce the
amount of land lost.
“We failed in our effort to protect our rivers,” she said at the
end of her talk.
On the other hand,
Dai Qing said, her generation can tell subsequent generations: “We
did a little. You do more.”
Despite some disheartening stories, the symposium was still a celebration
of water, and there were many reminders of its beauty and inspiration.
“After all my dealing with water, its sensual properties are what
are most compelling to me,” said Mary Miss.
Sensuality prevails in the work of Arno Minkkinen, a photographer
who incorporates the human body—usually his own—into landscapes to
produce lush visual images. Minkkinen, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell,
said he might have fulfilled his father’s wish that he become a missionary,
but for the church’s failure to stand up for the natural world that
is the subject of all his work.
“Isn’t it true,” he said, “that the cathedral is really here,
on earth, and we’re in the midst of it?”
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