Walking the Watershed

Walking the Watershed is a long-term project about the landscape, history, and politics of New York City’s water supply, and the relationship between the City and the mostly rural communities that supply its water.

Much of the physical and policy infrastructure of the water system is invisible to NYC residents. However, it has major impacts on the local communities in which the drinking water originates and is managed. Walking the Watershed brings the social, economic, political and ethical questions around this infrastructure to the surface, through a series of experiential and participatory projects.

Walking the Watershed is also an exercise in psychohydrogeography: revealing, through experiential methods, how (urban) forces shape the (rural) environment.

The project concentrates on the Catskills, where 90% of the City’s water comes from. Much of the Catskills was reconfigured over the past century, geographically and economically, by NYC water infrastructure and its related policy.

Exhibited:
>OCAD Gallery, Toronto, 2018; and Onomatopee, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2019
+City As Ecosystem, Arsenal Gallery, Central Park Armory, NYC, 2018
+Walking the Watershed, Erpf Gallery, Catskills Center, Arkville NY, 2018

Selected Presentations:
>Other Cartographies symposium, University of Bern - mLAB, 2022
+Watershed Roundtable, Hudson River Watershed Alliance, 2021
>Radical Cartography Now symposium, Brown University, 2019
+Watershed Forestry Institute, Watershed Agricultural Council, 2018, 2019
>Regional Extraction and Depedencies in the Hudson Valley, Columbia GSAPP, 2018
>Artifacts of the Future symposium, ICA Boston, 2017
+Liquid Geographies, New School/Urban Field Station, 2017
>Our Public Water: Tunnels and Tanks, La Casita Verde, 2017

Publications:
>Flows of Mutual Obligation, Urban Omnibus, 2022
>Diagrams of Power, Onomatopee, 2019

Residencies and Grants:
+Catskills Watershed Corporation, Public Education Grant, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022
+Humanities NY
+O'Connor Foundation
This project was developed during residencies at:
>Catskill Center, Platte Clove Artist Residency, 2016
>Urban Field Station Artist Residency (NYC Parks/US Forest Service), 2017
>Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Governor's Island Arts Center Residency, 2020