"Dear Danube, how can I map you? You are so mapped already. What is there left to see? I wonder."
Meander is a natural winding course of a river.
As the name suggests, Meandering Stories is a course of personal explorations about the way my life is shaped by and around the Danube. In other words, this research project explores the relationship between myself, my hometown, and the river.
Exhibition Installation / Stone Bench
After leaving my birthplace, Bratislava, I began questioning what home means to me. I conducted a field trip to revisit the location of the Danube.
Open to intuition, I captured my findings through audio, video, photographs, cyanotypes, and drawings. In the video essay, I combine these works and bring them to a bigger audience. This work invites one to sit down and immerse oneself in the flow of the river stories
The research project began as a form of mapping. I observed the river from a bird's-eye view through the maps, and archives and started my mapping of the location, based on my experiences and memories.
However, it did not represent the meaning of belonging I was searching for. Many problems are represented by the western way of mapping as exploitation, colonisation, and more. I found inspiration in an entirely different way of seeing and relating to the land represented by the Indigenous research paradigm, where the land and the people are not separate. The embodied understanding of a place was introduced to me through readings on Hydrofeminism from A. Neimanis. This encouraged me to conduct a trip to the Danube. Be there, touch it, smell it and witness it again.
"How can I be connected with my hometown through the water? I didn’t sail on a boat, I didn’t swim in there, I didn’t drink from it. And still, it is a symbol of my home."
Video Essay
by
Vanessa Sekacova
Music
by
Gheorghe Septelici
