River is a Relative
Co-hosted with Giselly Mejía Zapata
In collaboration with the Futures Studies & Speculative Design CPE Program at Parsons School of Design - The New School
Water has always been a teacher, though most of our systems have forgotten how to listen. 'River Is a Relative' was an online workshop to explore what listening to water might teach us about the futures we need to build now.
Across much of the South, water was once the organising principle of civic life. Rivers decided where we lived, how we worked, even how we worshipped. This conversation started with the recognition that our relationships with water have become abstract, and that remembering might itself be a political act.
By bringing together voices from South Asia and South America, this was an experiment in opening up a South–South space of learning and repair, where different ways of knowing, sensing, and caring for water can meet.
Participants co-created speculative freshwater rituals drawn from the oral traditions of both regions guided by Lagori’s South Asian Futures Framework and the principles of Buen Vivir. These lenses invited us to explore water as more-than-human kin and to reimagine care, reciprocity, and relation as foundations for shared futures.
We’re grateful to Julienne DeVita and the Futures Studies & Speculative Design Program at Parsons for opening the space for this exchange.
