Part 2 Getting into Hot Water
An installation of film, sound, and things made for the fishes of the Severn Estuary
In March 2024 three of us embarked on a ‘very dangerous field trip’ to Hinkley Point in Somerset in response to an article we read in a newspaper.
The Severn estuary is an important habitat for all sorts of creatures, fishes in particular, salmon and eel specifically.
From the estuary, follow the River Severn upstream for 120 miles and you will reach the point where it meets the River Stour. Follow the River Stour upstream for 20 miles and you will reach Stourbridge.
Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant, which is currently under construction will suck huge amounts of water from the estuary and Bristol Channel into its cooling systems taking hundreds of thousands of fish with it and killing them in the process.
The first solution to this problem proposed by EDF, the plant developers was to install 300 underwater sound projectors which would have ‘boomed noise louder than a jumbo jet’ into the sea to deter fish from entering the intake pipe. However, this idea was abandoned.
So it seems the fish will just have to be sacrificed in the name of progress…
We were appalled by this so, embarking on the field trip with our friend and poet ‘Roving Rick’ we called to the fishes through our Sonic Lighthouse apparel, both warning them of the impending danger and yearning for those who are yet to be lost.
LISTEN IN! Find out more at Radio Public with an episode about the journey to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset.
Getting Into Hot Water is a long-term social artwork that explores water and climate with the people of and around Dudley. Getting Into Hot Water aims to question the habitual ways by which we know water, stimulate dialogue regarding our relationship with water, engender a sense of curiosity and create a change in ourselves and human-water relations locally.
The key for us as social artists is process: of bringing people together, of inquiry through creative dialogue with places, entities, people and ideas, producing imaginative artistic works that are co-created and speak to others of new possibilities and more-than-human ways of thinking-doing-being.
As part of Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice, we are producing a body of processual, iterative and cumulative artwork. Getting Into Hot Water material art-things are not just product or a deliverable, they embody or carry the traces of our work; where we have been, what we have done, who (human and nonhuman) we have done it with, what we have encountered and what we have learned, serving as springboards into possibilities for the future and further process.
Climate action for us involves doing things, artistic things that take us away from the usual, mainstream climate change narratives to narratives that expand what counts as climate knowledge – many sensory, embodied, or affective ways of knowing. Perhaps our work creates imaginative capacity as a climate change resource; invites participation through experience and intimacy rather than persuasion; reveals the everyday, small, local, and neglected as a sites of climate action; makes space for ambiguity, allowing people to consider uncertainty. We consider ourselves to be activators rather than activists.
Part 3: Revolution Booth Oct 2nd-4th
https://www.workshop24.co.uk/ https://www.gettingintohotwater.org/
