What can the Mississippi River Valley teach us about how to read the planetary shifts of the Anthropocene through its local waterways and landscapes?

Curatorial Statement

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River makes the iconic landscape of the Mississippi River Valley legible as a critical zone of habitation and long-term interaction between humans and the environment. The project is a collaborative learning experiment to understand the river as a composite and storied space—emblematic in the way it grounds the global transition into the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of humankind. Through transdisciplinary field explorations and the production of locally situated conversations, the project contours the complex way in which histories, ecologies, technologies, and worldviews collate and collide to shape an entire river system.