This book is a co-creation, made by a crafter and a river, and all the beings inhabiting the river. It is about multispecies kinship and loss in the time of mass extinction. It is about love for a place, responsibility for land, relationship to animals and a lifelong-commitment to a river. It is the braiding together of the personal and the planetary, grass and hair, clay and mud, craft and river, river and I.

Throughout the year of 2019, Elin Sundström visits and works at the river she also calls her home. Through her ceramic work she enters a conversation with the river. With her wish to immerse herself in the stream and deepen her connection to the land, she sets out to integrate her work, her body and being in the river bank.

Sundström explores what it means to live in hydrocommons, to be an entangled part of river, and how it feels to be vulnerable in our togetherness. Through her work, she is confronted with the all that arises when confronted with ecosystem destruction; the rage, the mourning, and the love for an other you haven’t met.

River-and-I is an artist book containing field notes and photographs, documenting the work by the river, and reflections from a time of environmental disruption, with droughts, blazing fires, and habitats destroyed. A time when our deep connection with each other, also means a mutual implication in the dangers that run in our common waterways.

Working on the river bank with clay, mud, grass straw, footprints from a lynx in the snow, Sundström makes manifest the many entanglements of becomings, relations, histories and memories that form the river.

Artist book by Elin Sundström
Designed by Eller med a
Edited by Elena Lundqvist Ortiz
Published by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology

Possible thanks to the support from Michael Hermann Nielsens Mindelegat and Uppsala Regions konststipendium

© Elin Sundström & Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2021

ISBN: 978-87-93883-15-4