Somewhere Between Land and Water
This reflection is dedicated to the river’s edge—a place where land and water meet in a constant state of negotiation. It contemplates the tensions embedded within the shifting movements of this edge by revealing the stories of communities who embody daily relationships with the river on site but are somehow, always marginalized at its expense. Subjugated under various forms of control, colonization, contestation and division, the River Ravi in Lahore, Pakistan is represented as an unyielding body of water confined within a channel and bound to a static edge. However, missing from within these numerous misrepresentations of Ravi are the stories entrenched around its very edge. Stories belonging to the multiple communities who reflect modes of dwelling within the land while actively responding to the changing conditions of the river. When etched on paper, these movements are reduced to a single line delineating land from water; and these stories are wiped away under its weight, transforming this one thriving river into a depleted site of extraction bearing the weight of changing climates, and infrastructure development.
The dissonances between its representation and oral histories draw a binary separation in the ways we perceive not just land and water but also humans and the environment. The static, singular representation of the river’s edge marks a divide between the river and its communities, erasing the many complexities nurtured within their relationship. Transcending narratives of power and control, contrary to its misrepresentations the movements of the river’s edge reflect on how land, water and communities are entwined in ways that transcend borders--creating dynamic spaces where the natural world is constantly shaped by human intervention and vice versa, often in tension. This drawing traces and challenges these static representations of the river and its constructed identity as it flows past the city of Lahore. It is an act of encountering the landscape, or more aptly, the Ravi floodplain as a complex construction of culture, memory, and its interactions on land, with communities and ultimately the city as inherently entwined.