Waterways

Waterways is conceived as a new travelling festival of art, science, and culture that follows Atlantic salmon into encounters with local landscapes, distant seascapes, community histories, and the choices that shape our future. It brings complex data into dialogue with artistic practice to ask questions about the interconnections between conservation, ecology and culture.

An initial scoping project will chart paths towards an annual events programme, a digital home for the art, research, and other forms of storytelling, and a legacy of permanent installations in the landscape. This will be achieved through: a durational, field-based development workshop involving site visits along one salmon waterway; two one-day workshops in Glasgow or Edinburgh with a wider set of partners and advisors; and initial art commissions to produce work for a 2025 pilot festival.

This initiative will establish an annual cycle involving not just production of the public festival but commissioning of new work that broadens the scope and diversity of the stories, resources and partners that the salmon lead us into. This project will visit (either physically or conceptually) many salmon rivers around the UK, follow the fish across the North Atlantic, and make connections to the North Pacific and Arctic.