Gabriela Garcia-Luna
figure 2: Traced ink drawings from figure 3 , upscaled to cover four tarps. The Saskatchewan Watershed --- streams, rivers, lakes and delta marshland – is cut into the tarps to create connected and gaping overhead basins and
paths that cast shadow maps on the floor and walls. Water Basin I (Saskatchewan River) , installation; 4 tarps, 359 x 1280 x 853 cm, 2018-2019
A watershed dream is shared by contemporary bioregionalists as well as the visionary nineteenth century head of the U.S. Geological Survey, John Wesley Powell, who, in 1890 proposed dividing the arid American west along twenty-three watershed boundaries. 3 Now, in a time of climate crisis, this vision is needed to remind us of what has been lost even if it seems only a dream from an unrealized past. What might it mean to live with 'watershed mind'? 4 To feel the connection between water in and outside our bodies, upstream and downstream from our point on a map? Might “watershed” itself be too static a term for something so fluid -- given water is an element that erodes edges and consists of multiple “nested and overlapping scales ranging from the interiority of individual bodies to the planetary hydrological cycle.”? 5 3 Ross, John F. 'The Visionary John Wesley Powell Had a Plan for Developing the West, But Nobody Listened'. July 3, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john- wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/ Accessed 8 Nov. 2022. 4 Peter Warshall used this term to describe the shift in thinking needed to better align ourselves with water. Warshall, Peter. 'Watershed Governance'. Writing on Water, edited by Rothenberg and Ulvaeus, MIT Press, 2001. p 47 5 Biro, Andrew. 'River-Adaptiveness in a Globalized World'. Thinking with Water , edited by Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. p 175
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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