Water Tells Our Story

Sulina is home to countless stories: histories that mirror the socio-political realities of their time at the confluence of the Danube and the Black Sea, testimonies of irreversible changes reshaping the landscape and ways of life, and myths that reflect the region’s multicultural fabric. It is said that humans are the only creatures on Earth who need stories to understand what kind of beings they are. When the present feels dystopian, what kind of future can we still imagine?

With its layered history and ecological complexity, Sulina is reimagined by artists Daria Anghel, Veronika Varga, and Manuela Pauk through explorations of survival and resilience in a speculative future. Sulina in 2075, water chestnut seeds (Trapa natans), degraded landscapes – as agents of regeneration, lay the foundation for alternative ontologies, with a shared impulse toward the natural world and a renewed attention to the non-human entities with whom we have always coexisted. This approach resists the catastrophic narrative, calling instead for responsibility through storytelling, fiction, and imagination, offering an alternative to the prevailing vision of the future as an inevitable apocalypse.

Daria Anghel
Sulina, 2073
speculative text inspired by the imagination of locals in Sulina. 2024

Daria Anghel (Romania) is an emerging critic, writer and activist, born and raised in Romania yet frequently occupying spaces of in-between. Having earned her MA in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement from New York University with a Fulbright Student Award, she deeply engages with feminist methodology and emergent strategy in both work and daily life. In other words, she is preoccupied with the direction in which our world is headed, and wishes to collaboratively imagine a future that is kinder, more loving and more sustainable for all humans, (non-)living beings, and planetary systems. Her main focus is on humans’ relationships with their immediate environments, as well as humans’ relationships to each other.

Veronika Varga
Delta Imaginaries
triptych, print after cyanotype works, text, 2024

Veronika Varga (Hungary) is an artist and researcher with a background in architecture. Her practice merges visual storytelling with the spatial analysis of contemporary conflicts, and it can be broadly characterized as concerned with technological objects that organize social relations. She has a particular fascination with industrialized rivers within the post-soviet periphery, some of which have been the subject of her recent investigations. She primarily works with time-based media, photography, and writing. Veronika holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths and a B.Arch from Cornell University.

Manuela Pauk
Floating Reflexions
digital print, 305 mm x 2103 mm, 2024

Outside: Whispers of a Seed
poster, 2024

Manuela Pauk (Croația) was born in 1994 in Zagreb. She graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine arts in Zagreb in 2018. In her work she explores ecological themes as well as intersections of human civilization and nature. Her works were exhibited in 13 solo and more than 30 group exhibitions both in Croatia and abroad and are in collections of Croatian Museum of Natural History and Dubrava Cultural Center in Zagreb, Croatia, and the City Museum of Aveiro, Portugal.

DELTA IMAGINARIES – I
Fictionalised ethnography of the present

An overwhelmingly pungent smell engulfed the boat as we turned into the narrow canal. ‘Who died here?’ asked one of the other passengers who clearly lost interest in continuing the otherwise scenic tour through the malodourous channel. ‘The plauri are grieving.’ Our guide explained that reed beds die and break off from the marsh, turning into floating islands that block the man-made channels used for navigating the delta. His mental cartography of this network of waterways is thus changing every day. ‘The Canalul Împuțita’ – meaning stinky channel in Romanian – ‘used to be a key connection between two major wet-ways. But now it is blocked by a plaur’ – a floating reed island – ‘so no-one can cross all the way through. The floating island also slows down the flow of water, which causes increased eutrophication.’ He didn’t use the term eutrophication, I replaced it for the sake of brevity. Instead, he explained that waste water and chemical pollutants carried by the Danube can contribute to the creation of these hypoxic dead zones in the water. ‘The death of the plauri and other living matter is accelerated in this ‘dead zone’ environment, which causes a build-up of phosphorus’ – he said to explain where this noxious ‘rotten-egg’ smell is coming from…

… is how I imagined my first interaction with the Canalul Împuțita. Without access to a guide who would take me inside the canal, I had to fictionalise this encounter, as this place is central to how I came to re-conceptualise the delta as an unmappable geography.

Throughout the history of civilisation in the delta, it has been portrayed and imagined in countless ways, often depicting contradictory relations to the landscape.

Navigating through the mosaics of the wetlands by boat through natural and man-made canals and traversing through a sequence of large lakes, I realised that the wilderness of the delta is simply a fantasy constructed for ecotourists and other travellers. If it was up to the wetlands, the landscape would not only be un-mappable, but also un-navigable. These ‘lakes’ that have historically been represented as fixed entities within the landscape, in fact only give the appearance of lakes because of centuries of reed-management practices that kept these spaces clear of the floating islands of plaur. The imagery of the wetlands as a dense landscape of homogenous reed marshes we are used to is also a product of cyclical burning and harvesting practices of local stewards of the delta. Today with the introduction of strict biosphere conservation legislation, the reeds are let to grow untamed, mirroring western fantasies of the wild. Within the pixels of satellite imagery, temporal information of the geometries of the wetland can be found, but these are asynchronous with how the environment is experienced by those who dwell within. The dying reeds and the floating plaur change not only the contours of the lakes of the wetlands, but they also alter navigation channels used by fishermen and tour guides.
This quality of the Danube Delta makes it inherently resistant to the cartographic, neocolonial gaze.

DELTA IMAGINARIES – II
Fictionalised ethnography of the past

We received news that the border guards were making their way up the Danube, confiscating food and other essential supplies. We did not have much left to share, it was a harsh year, difficult to grow enough to just sustain ourselves. We didn’t have any other options left if we wanted to live through the winter, so we packed up our tools and basic supplies and fled to where we knew they couldn’t find us. The maze of the delta was difficult to navigate even for those of us who made our living from fishing in its lakes and harvesting its reeds, so we knew it would be impossible for them to trace us. We, the people of the plaur, grew up learning how to cultivate floating islands, as we didn’t have large areas of arable land available to feed an entire village. Seeking refuge in the marshes felt natural. Hiding within its maze-like network of floating islands, we developed small plots of agricultural land on the plaur, which remained invisible to the untrained military eye…

…is how I imagine an inhabitant of the delta from 1947 would recount their experiences of the wetlands as a site of resistance to an ethnographer. This account is fictionalised, but it is not made up. The plaur also resurfaced as a site of refuge during the Euromaidan and the Crimean war in 2014.

The delta is not only a site of resistance for human inhabitants, but also for more-than-human ecologies. The reed beds play a key role in filtering out the pollution carried by the Danube, as the excess nutrients are trapped and absorbed by the roots. The altered nutrition causes an increase in stalk density and decrease in height and root mass, thereby transforming the image of the plaur into a material evidence of transboundary pollution of the Danube. The presence of reed peat also reduces the build-up of methane in the soil and it stabilises the banks of the river by trapping sediments, making the dramatically changing landscape of the delta more easily inhabitable for other species too.

When plaur is colonised by other plants, the buoyancy of the floating reed beds decreases, causing them to eventually sink to the bottom of the lakes. These sunken islands form the organic bottom of deep-water lakes in the delta.

Besides eutrophication, colonisation by other plants is the biggest threat to the reed population of the Danube Delta.

DELTA IMAGINARIES – III
Speculative ethnography of the future

I remember when it was still possible to go on a sunset bird watching tour in the Musura Bay, where the Sulina branch of the Danube and the Black Sea meet. It was the largest bird colony on a floating island that I’ve ever seen. Now, the Bay is not so much a bay anymore; it is essentially unnavigable by boat. At first, it was only partially isolated from the sea by a thin peninsula made up of reed marsh. The surface of the bay was already covered in a dense fabric of helophytes – a type of perennial bog plant – but the lake was navigable through a path kept clear by the boats of tourists and fishermen. Eventually, the bog plants were replaced and the dominance of the reed rendered undeniable. The delta doesn’t look like it used to but it also doesn’t reflect what it will be like. It is perpetually transforming. The West Delta Forest may give us a clue for how the Eastern Marshlands might look like in a 150 years: the estuaries of the Delta will slowly fill up with sediment and become uninhabitable for the reed, which is its current defining feature. It will then slowly be replaced by a Forest. The landscape will no longer resemble the ‘wilderness of the marshland’; it will be a habitat for new ecologies as its current inhabitants migrate further east…

… is how I imagine a future eco-tour guide from Sulina might reflect on the changing Danube Delta based on current patterns of reed transformation.

The Delta is in perpetual transformation either in response to changes in climatic conditions or as a result of human industrial activity. In Ceausescu’s time, the marshland in its natural state was perceived as ‘wasted land’ destabilised by flooding and merely awaiting development. This ‘wasted land’ is home to at least 300 species of birds and a natural barrier to human and agricultural sewage of all upstream countries. It was seen by Ceausescu’s environmental planners as an industrial site to be reclaimed from the water. Around 80,000 hectares of wetland was drained in part for agricultural usage and in part for the development of fish farms. Both fish production and monocultural farming refused to prosper, so the ecological rearrangement of the delta was a failed nature-transformation attempt.

The wetlands will always be in flux, which speaks of the ability of these ecologies to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The shape-shifting character of the landscape is the source of the resilience of the delta.

CYANOTYPE AS METHOD

The cyanotype is a camera-less printing process that was invented in 1842 primarily for the documentation of herbarium. It is a contact print that is made by placing an object (a plant) onto photo-sensitive paper and exposing them to light. It is then fixed by washing away the photo-sensitive cyanotype molecules with water. The resulting print is relative to how transparent the material is to the projected sunlight.

The monochrome blue-coloured printing method was later adapted as a medium for reproducing technical drawings – or ‘blueprints’. Cyanotypes are inherently archival and cartographic in nature, but through the slow-printing process, they also generate imperfect replicas of an image.

Here, the cyanotype is appropriated for the production of imaginary scenes from the delta through bleaching and layering subsequent photographic prints. This fictionalised archive elaborates on the idea that materials are not merely representational but also evidentiary in nature – the Delta remains unmappable.