Let the river run both ways
Let the river run both ways
Made during a 6 month residency at Forgan Arts Centre, Scotland, October 2025- March 2026
Two-screen film and installation, 2026
Let the river run both ways is a two-screen film installation. It is a layered meditation on the River Tay, and the entangled relationships between the human and more-than-human world. The work weaves together documentary footage, philosophical conversation, performance, music and online videos, to explore how rivers flow through bodies, memory, and the wider political and ecological systems we all survive within.
During workshops and gatherings, children and adults spent time with the artists on the foreshore of River Tay, in shared acts of imaginative and embodied creation and reflection. The resulting film installation gathers these traces and voices into an intergenerational philosophical reflection on rivers, animism and relationality.
The work also touches on less visible currents running through river Tay and the Tay estuary: as an important site for North Sea oil and gas infrastructure, and home to the lamprey, an ancient parasitic fish. Linking the world of the river into wider stories of more-than-human survival, colonialism and global capital, the film asks how we might learn to think with rivers to imagine other forms of relation and care in a damaged world.
Central to the film is an original soundtrack by Curlew – Scottish alt-folk musician and audiovisual artist Gill Higgins – who grew up near the Tay and composes in dialogue with them, layering synths, harmonium, field recordings, and ethereal vocals. Her arrangement in Gaelic of Josie Duncan’s Gusgal Ròin (seal song) brings an echo of selkie folklore into the film, deepening themes of transformation and the porous boundary between river, sea, human life and the living systems that sustain it.
The work has been developed through workshops led in collaboration with artist Laura Burns, choreographer Lucy Suggate, visual artist Charlie Ford, philosopher Grace Lockrobin, and outdoor adventure leader Piotr Gudan.
