Water Chronicles: exploring stories of accessibility in urban water spaces

Partners: Surge Coop (Newham, London) and Insola (Berlin)

Image © Surge Coop, Ruth Keating

"A new collaboration between Surge Cooperative (with Blanc Sceol) and Insola presents a unique opportunity to explore urban waterscapes through artistic and environmental lenses. Our partnership will foster interdisciplinary exchanges that highlight water’s ecological, social, and political dimensions, building long-term strategies for creating public art and advocacy projects centered around water as a shared resource."

Surge Coop and Insola

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To give some insight into their early partnership conversations, Surge Cooperative, Blanc Sceol and Insola have agreed to share some snapshots from their affectionately named “fluid shared brain.” Miro Board.

A glimpse into a 'fluid shared brain' Miro board

The following update is via Blanc Sceol's Instagram, view the orginal post:

We’re back from an inspiring few days visiting Insola in Berlin, in the return visit for our @culturalbridgenetwork funded project ‘Water Chronicles’. We’ve spent the last 8 months connecting with @federico.forestiero @nicolorina_ and Fite, organisers of the free floating art platform on the Spree in Berlin, as artists and members of @surge_coop, learning from each other’s approaches to connecting people with water in our respective cities. We spent our time immersed in the Spree’s floating cultural space, a biodiverse flotsam of hand built floating platforms and embellished boats, each unique and full of the character of their makers, and inhabited by a variety of communal endeavours from sauna’s to theatres to greenhouses… we journeyed around the bay on board the iconic blue Insola platform in a grey October riverscape, the boats around resting in the water, awaiting the warmer weather to come alive with chatter and people. We listened to the water from afar via a live stream box, weathering a storm over night and bringing us the sounds of rain, wind, midnight walkers and birds.
We’re excited to be planning the next phase of our collaboration, a co-curated exchange of artists to enliven each other’s flow… The Water Chronicles continue…

About the partners

Surge Cooperative are a not-for-profit coop living and working on the Channelsea river in Newham, London, since 2018. Our aim is to co-develop the Channelsea River and Bow Creek as a creative, livable, cohesive, resilient, and participatory blue- green space within East London. This will be achieved via affordable and climate adaptable cooperative moorings, alongside creative artist-led environmental restoration projects, and outdoor community education. This is against a backdrop of a legacy of industrialisation and environmental degradation, climate change, pressures to provide high density housing and economic incentives from commercial developers in the UK’s poorest borough.

Since its founding in 2020, Insola as a non-profit collective has curated over 50 activities, engaging a wide range of artists, from international professionals to emerging local talent and students. Located on the water in Berlin's Rummelsburger Bay, Insola offers a public space that bridges art with activism, addressing issues such as gentrification and the preservation of cultural values. Our platform has become a vital site for socially engaged art, hosting performances, installations, music events, workshops, and public dialogues. Through these activities, we create a community-driven space on the water where creativity serves as a catalyst for social change. We foster collaboration not only between artists but also with local communities, ensuring that the arts remain a powerful tool for shaping social narratives and promoting collective action. The water-based location invites everyone to engage, using the space as both an artistic and public resource.

Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White) are an artist duo who work site-responsively with sound, listening and performance, often at the inter-section of creative and community engagement in conservation and ecology. We explore healing modalities as tools for collective transformation. Blanc Sceol are also co-directors of Surge Cooperative.