When Rivers Speak

We usually know a river by its name. We know where it comes from, where it goes, what territories it crosses, where it widens or narrows. On a map, it is a line; in the landscape, a flow; and in the world built by humans, a space over or alongside which roads and bridges pass. All of this is true, but a river cannot be reduced to any of it.

Maud van den Beuken’s work begins precisely with this irreducibility.

Her interest in the river is, first of all, a question of attention. What becomes visible when we look at a river not as a complete landscape, but by following the materials and traces through which it appears? Mud, sediment, the riverbed. What the river carries, leaves behind, or shapes in the course of its movement.

This attention also has a critical dimension.

The history of the Dutch landscape is deeply connected to the work of controlling water and protecting land from it. Dikes, dams, canals, and other engineering structures have shaped an environment in which water and land were to be separated as clearly as possible. A river, however, does not submit to such a final division. It moves, leaves its bed, carries sediment, alters its banks, and reshapes its course.

Mud is a particular kind of material within this relationship.

It is difficult to call it simply soil or simply water. It appears where the two meet and, for precisely this reason, disrupts the clear division upon which our desire to control the landscape is built. Maud’s attention to mud can be understood as a sensitivity to this division: not an attempt to separate land from water, or water from land, but to follow those material states in which the two are already mixed.

Here, her poetics emerge from matter.

In Maud’s field notes, the phrase becoming with the river is followed by a series of actions: to drink, walk along the river, wash, swim, dive, measure, dredge, watch, listen, speak with the river, become friends, feel, think, travel, paddle, cross, become a bridge.

This list is important not simply because it describes possible actions in relation to a river, but because it shifts the position of the observer. The river is no longer something we look at from the bank. Our relationship with it becomes bodily, active, and reciprocal. The river becomes something with which one can be.

Here, the phrase “relationship with nature” acquires a very concrete meaning. It is no longer only a question of preserving nature or assuming responsibility toward it. Before that comes another question: what kind of existence is that with which we are in a relationship?

In Maud’s work, this question gradually moves toward matter.

Sedere—to sit. Sediment.

Sediment is material carried by a flow that, at a certain moment, comes to rest. But its resting is never a complete end. It can move again, be carried elsewhere, accumulate in another place. Sediment is both a trace of movement and the possibility of its continuation.

In Maud’s notes, this movement becomes a chain of words:

river / cloud / rain / flood / house / mud,

then:

road / brick / cement / floor / wall / bowl,

and in another direction:

glacier / ice / stone / lake / home of fish.

What is interesting here is that there is no fixed boundary between the words. One thing passes into another. Material from nature can enter the human-made environment, while the human-made environment can bear the trace of that same material. The river does not end where the road begins, and mud does not cease to be part of the river’s history when it becomes the material of brick or cement.

These transitions are important to me in Maud’s work because they allow the river to be seen not as a separate natural object, but as a node of relationships.

This is perhaps where the ecological question begins to open onto a broader question of existence.

Not only how do we preserve the river, but how do we understand the existence of which we are already a part?

In Maud’s Riverbed materials, this question takes on a spatial and bodily form. The riverbed is, for her, the place “where you put down your weight to rest upon.” At the same time, her notes refer to “the little space it allows in relation to river”—the small space that the river allows a person in their relationship with it.

There is an interesting tension between these two formulations.

We place our weight on the riverbed, but the riverbed itself has been formed by the movement of water, the accumulation of material, and the transformation of the earth. We rest on a space that is itself the result of continuous movement.

The riverbed is no longer simply the path of the water.

It becomes a place where body and space meet.

And it is here that another important movement emerges for me in Maud’s work: the attempt to materialize emptiness.

The riverbed can be understood as the space occupied by water or left behind in its wake. But the space that appears empty nevertheless has a form. It has depth, boundaries, volume. It can be felt by the body, measured, imagined, sculpted.

In this sense, Maud, following the example of Rachel Whiteread, attempts to embody something that is not itself a body.

Her interest in natural volumes is no longer simply a question of representing nature. It is connected to the question of how art can make tangible an existence that usually presents itself as absence: emptiness, a riverbed, space.

This is where, for me, her work moves beyond the limits of landscape representation.

The river becomes not an image, but a relationship.

Not an object, but a process.

Not a defined body, but something that is continually acquiring and losing its body.

And if the existence of the river is so closely bound to matter, space, and movement, perhaps speaking about it does not have to begin with its name.

It can begin with its voice.

The voices of different rivers emerge from vinyl record players and travel through fired-clay horns. At their core are recordings of real rivers, combined with rhythm and tempo created by composer and musician Sophia Bardoutsou. One of them is the Arax.

The presence of the Arax carries a particular resonance in the Armenian context. The expression “Mother Arax,” formulated by the Armenian poet Raphael Patkanyan, has long taken the river beyond the boundaries of a geographical name. By calling the river “mother,” we attribute to it not only a human quality, but a status within a relationship: the river is no longer simply a watercourse that exists there, but someone to whom one can speak.

With Maud, this relationship is constructed differently. Rather than humanizing the river, she approaches it through its material existence. To listen not to what we might imagine the river would say, but to what its flow, sediment, mud, riverbed, and space can compel us to notice.

For this reason, I understand the artist’s invitation to listen to rivers less as a metaphorical proposition than as an invitation to change the way we attend to them.

The river does not acquire a human voice.

Our position as listeners changes.

And here, it seems to me, lies the strongest ecological consequence of Maud’s work. Our relationship with nature begins not only when we decide to protect it. It begins when we stop seeing nature as a silent backdrop to our human world.

Listening is one of the simplest forms of that change.

It requires time, attention, and a certain relinquishing of our habitual confidence that we already know what it is we are looking at.

In Maud’s work, this relinquishment does not lead to silence. On the contrary, it opens the possibility of another conversation.

With the river.

With mud.

With sediment.

With the riverbed.

With everything we usually consider matter, trace, or emptiness, but which may also be a form of communication.

This is where the word “when” becomes important.

Not if rivers could ever speak.

But when we begin to notice that they are already speaking.

And at that point, the task is not to make rivers speak.

The task is to develop our capacity to listen.

Nazareth Karoyan