“Most Indigenous peoples have a land-based, holistic, and relational worldview that is both spiritual and material. It is an expression of their identity, culture, and values that encompasses their livelihood, community, and continuity of their traditions.”
(Kimmerer, 2013).
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Look—over there it was thirty centimeters high. Then the hail came. I showed it to you in the video. The ground turned white. This whole area, all the way to the village, turned white. Everything across there—look at this land—there was so much grass that you could have grazed it and had full milk production for two months. And then the hail comes, and the next day it’s like this—smashed flat, burned, like a frying pan, just like you saw. And then you tell me—nothing’s left.”
Vachon, John, photographer. Ravalli County, Montana. Lamb immediately after birth. Ravalli County United States Montana, 1942. Apr. Photograph.
Vachon, John, photographer. Ravalli County, Montana. New lamb a few minutes after birth, trying to get on its feet. United States Ravalli County Montana, 1942. Apr.
Vachon, John, photographer. Ravalli County, Montana. New lamb about five minutes after birth on his legs for the first time. Montana United States Ravalli County, 1942.
This project began from an observation of how water shapes human life. Wherever it gathers, recedes, or moves, it conditions what can grow and how communities organize themselves around possibility or limitation. Proximity to water enables cultivation, exchange, and movement; its absence produces different rhythms of labor, scarcity, and adaptation. Water not only shapes ecosystems and terrain — it also structures settlement, social relations, and cultural practices. Flow, circulation, and access become underlying forces through which ways of living take form, shaping rituals, rhythms, and choreographies of daily life.
Where the Water Flows is an artistic research project that unfolds as a multimedia installation exploring how land shapes cultural identity, memory, and sustainability. The work combines analog photography, photo-based wall works, projected video, sound, and archival materials, while engaging with contemporary technologies to explore layered temporalities, speculative pasts, and possible futures.
Analog tools foreground material and durational engagement with the land. The slowness of film encourages attention, presence, and embodied observation. It reflects the repetitive gestures and rituals embedded in land-based practices — walking fields, guiding animals, tending soil — movements that form a choreography shaped by terrain and season. In contrast, digital and computational tools introduce another temporal layer. They reference the speed and technological mediation of contemporary life while enabling speculative interpretations of landscape across time.
Conceptually, the project draws from Indigenous Knowledge Systems and relational worldviews that understand land not as a resource but as a living and interconnected presence. Within these frameworks, knowledge is grounded in reciprocity and accountability: to give to the land and to receive what it regenerates without excess extraction. Sustainability here is understood as balance rather than excess, emerging through attention to natural cycles, interdependence, and the ritualized rhythms of human–land engagement.
The work engages communities whose lives remain closely connected to farming, shepherding, and other forms of land stewardship, including regenerative agricultural practices. These practices are approached as adaptive, intergenerational systems of knowledge that persist under economic and environmental pressures. Research in agricultural environmental ethics suggests that sustainability is not merely a technical question of efficiency, but a moral and philosophical issue concerning human responsibility toward land. Regenerative agriculture, in this context, can be seen as a contemporary expression of relational principles — focusing on soil health, biodiversity, cyclical processes, and long-term ecological vitality rather than short-term productivity.
Within this framework, Where the Water Flows raises a central inquiry: can prevailing growth-oriented definitions of sufficiency be re-evaluated? If being sufficient means maintaining balance in relationships rather than constantly accumulating, are land-based, regenerative ways of living still possible today? What could sustainability mean beyond productivity and economic growth?
Situated at the intersection of documentary photography, cultural anthropology, and environmental studies, the project integrates artistic practice, scientific research, community participation, and archival investigation. By combining these approaches, Where the Water Flows repositions land as a living archive — shaped by ecological processes, cultural memory, ritual practice, and contemporary technological mediation.
