Territorial Tendencies: Constructing Alpine River Portraits
Branner and Beckerman Travel Fellowship, UC Berkeley, 2020–2025
Exhibit at UC Berkeley, February 2025
The proliferating commodification and privatization of water has led to the urbanization of even the most remote reaches of the planet. As an inquiry into the ways in which architecture engages with geography across layers of territory and emerging types of urbanization, this project composes portraits of three Alpine rivers—the Po, Rhône, and Rhine. Moments of extraction, tourism, resilience, and adaptation are documented along the course of each river, traced by bike and train from source to mouth.
An exhibition held at UC Berkeley presents three films, in which an installation is staged at the source of each river. Aforementioned river documentation is cast onto flowing green-screen assemblies, serving to conflate the entirety of each river into its ostensibly untouched and natural source, provoking questions of water property and the role of architecture in an ever-changing climate.
