Presentation:
Hydrologies of Dispossession
Ifor Duncan
Online
December 10, 2025 18.30
![Figure 5 Bocachico <i>Soy el Río Cauca</i> [Ben, Cauca Nehri] (2025) filminden bir kare](/directus/media/thumbnails/figure-5_bocachico-jpg-780-5000-false.jpg)
Still from Soy el Río Cauca [I Am the River Cauca] (2025)
Rivers are on the frontline of environmental devastation. Facing manifold threats—pollution, drought, displacement, and dispossession—communities living with freshwater environments are central to the pursuit of ecological justice.
In this presentation, artist and researcher Ifor Duncan will reflect on the relationship between rivers and power in cases where the very ways of knowing and managing water have become deadly—a process he has termed “necro-hydrology.” Investigating how water has been weaponized, he will share insights from his research on the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa border between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria; the construction of the Hidroituango megadam and its intersections with past and ongoing paramilitary violence along the Cauca River in Colombia; and the confluence of the Wisła, Soła, and Przemsza rivers in Poland as both an infrastructure and a processual archive of genocide.
The presentation will also reflect on collaborative and interdisciplinary practice-led methods for researching the confluent politics of riverine ecologies, such as submerged moving image and sound, interviews, and textual analysis. Duncan will approach these cases through relational and anti-colonial perspectives to redress water’s abstraction, dehistoricization, and universalization by terrestrially biased and resource-focused colonial sciences.
Organized as part of Water Assemblies, this presentation will be held in English and is open to everyone. The program will take place online via Zoom. Click here to register.
Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist, and postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council project “EcoViolence” at Utrecht University. His research focuses on political violence against communities in the context of degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities, including river borders, mega-dam projects, and rivers as dynamic archives of genocide. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual methods. Duncan holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a lecturer from 2022 to 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia between 2020 and 2022.
In this presentation, artist and researcher Ifor Duncan will reflect on the relationship between rivers and power in cases where the very ways of knowing and managing water have become deadly—a process he has termed “necro-hydrology.” Investigating how water has been weaponized, he will share insights from his research on the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa border between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria; the construction of the Hidroituango megadam and its intersections with past and ongoing paramilitary violence along the Cauca River in Colombia; and the confluence of the Wisła, Soła, and Przemsza rivers in Poland as both an infrastructure and a processual archive of genocide.
The presentation will also reflect on collaborative and interdisciplinary practice-led methods for researching the confluent politics of riverine ecologies, such as submerged moving image and sound, interviews, and textual analysis. Duncan will approach these cases through relational and anti-colonial perspectives to redress water’s abstraction, dehistoricization, and universalization by terrestrially biased and resource-focused colonial sciences.
Organized as part of Water Assemblies, this presentation will be held in English and is open to everyone. The program will take place online via Zoom. Click here to register.
Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist, and postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council project “EcoViolence” at Utrecht University. His research focuses on political violence against communities in the context of degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities, including river borders, mega-dam projects, and rivers as dynamic archives of genocide. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual methods. Duncan holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a lecturer from 2022 to 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia between 2020 and 2022.
The program is realized with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
