โFrom the source to the mouth and everything in betweenโ is an embodied research performance that traces the Danube River from the source in the Black Forest to the delta in the Black Sea. By crossing 2,850 km, I want to return to a river tied to my own history and cultural belonging to explore human influence over more-than-human entities, fluid ethnicity, and what it means to become a water body. Through embodied methods for walking and listening, and gathering sensory media and written documentation, I want to search for new forms of empathy, ecological awareness, and psychogeography, allowing the river to guide my movement and research. Both the water and the human body become archives and active receivers, absorbing and processing sensory, political, and spatial data, while navigating shifting historical and ecological landscapes.
ย I journey from west to east across natural and human-made borders. For me, this way of moving with and through the river is a way of gathering embodied knowledge and of contesting our prevailing sense of communal division and disconnection from nature. This experience is inevitably a politically charged action; embracing it as such pushes against hardened notions of identity, territory, and belonging. I approach the river through a feminist and hydrofeminist lens, relating my body of water to the Danubian body of water, porous, leaking, transforming. Walking will become a sound composition and a daily ritual, speaking with the river through my shadow and footsteps, listening to her question my personhood and practising interspecies attention together.โโโโโโโ
waterbody 1
waterbody 2
waterbody 3
My connection to the Danube began more than a decade ago when I lived by her banks in Ruse, Bulgaria.ย Back then, I had weekly conversations with her, while strolling by her side, about my place in the world, the future, and the past. I would imagine she talked back to me in all the languages she would speak, reaching inwards in search of resonance. For me, the Danube is more than a geographical line; she is a transcendental entity, a porous, living source with agency, memory, and voice, echoing and connecting through her natural and man-made surroundings. I believe that by embodying more-than-human entities and finding ways to relate and listen to their voices, we can continue to challenge our personhood and deepen our understanding of the natural network we are part of. I think itโs urgent to dare to question our identities, to attune and listen to the world around us, and challenge our sense of belonging. By positioning the Danube as a narrator, I want to move beyond human-centered perspectives on landscape, time, and relationality, to search for connections with others along the river, and discover how bodies of water shape identity. The river is a unifying stream, a portal, and a home. Her waters are filled with memory, porous, always in motion, and from her gutter sources she makes her way through, seeking the mouth of the sea.
video collageย
audio created by using the image parameters. shapes, and color frequencies as a score.ย
Photo and video documentation,ย collected during a research residency at Belgrade AiR, in March 2026.ย
Photographs by Casper Maas, during Art Stipendium Award Ceremonyย
Unfolding over three months as a temporal performance, and supported by the Artist in Space trajectory and the Noordenaars organisation in the north of the Netherlands, the self-initiated work, โFrom the source to the mouth and everything in between,โ lets body and water become archives and active receivers, absorbing sensory, political, and spatial data on the way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. I want to move through human entanglements with more-than-human entities and carry the idea of belonging downstream.
