On 6th September 2025, River Hope’s convenor attended an inspiring event “Voice of Water” at the Tate Modern in London. This was a transnational conversation on the rights of rivers and oceans with reflections on how to rebuild celebratory connections and kinship with land and waterways, and meaningfully include and represent the voices of diverse bodies of water – from small streams to the global Ocean – in human assemblies.
We heard from:
Carolina Caycedo, indigenous artist and activist from the Yuma River in Colombia (see Serpent River book photo); Serpent River Book is an artist book with pages that pleat and fold outwards to resemble a meandering river across the gallery space. It comprises texts, photographs, maps and archival material gathered during Caycedo’s ongoing research project, Be Dammed, which examines the social and environmental effects of damming practices in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico.
Emma Critchley, lead artist for the Rights of the Deep: a contribution to the growing Rights of Nature movement, this project brings together indigenous Pacific activists, legal scholars and marine scientists to co-write an open letter about our relationship with the deep-ocean and the need to protect it. Excerpts from the letter are incorporated into a wall-based artwork which draws on diagrams of global ocean circulation. The open letter can be read as a printed copy in the gallery, and the full text is available to download. (see deep ocean worm cast beside a section of the Charter).
Anne Robertson, Professor of Ecology at Roehampton University, freshwater ecologist working with interdisciplinary teams on the legal personhood of rivers;
Members of Love our Ouse from Lewes, Sussex, whose advocacy and action catalysed the first UK council formally supporting a River Charter. Lewes District Council formally decided to support the Ouse River Charter in full following on from the Motion on River Rights in February 2023 and two years of extensive activity; forming a Rights of River Steering Group, a River Rights Summit, community workshops from source to sea, the input of expert legal opinion and the drafting of a Charter for the River Ouse. This was a momentous decision and the first time in the UK that a Council has signed up to a River Rights Charter.