Lower Silesian Aqua-Guide. The Region’s Waters as Places of Remembrance and Natural and Cultural Heritage

The project involves researching Lower Silesian rivers, springs, and reservoirs as places of memory in the region’s culture and history, and as components of its natural and cultural heritage. The main focus is on the waters of Lower Silesia, the Sudetes, and the so-called Eastern Lusatia as places of memory and natural and cultural heritage in the 20th and 21st centuries, with essential references to earlier eras, including rivers as relic administrative boundaries, spas in the region as local culture-forming environments, collective memory and literary phenomena related to the region’s waters, oral history, social, cultural, artistic, ecological, and tourist activities in relation to regional rivers or other “water places.”

Photographing water objects and phenomena, which are their reference and material trace in the landscape, is a documentary activity, but it also serves to reflect on the “mediality” of knowledge about the region, which is produced and interpreted both in the changing perspective of the dominant ideology or colonial relations (centre-periphery), as well as in the perspective of the historical and cultural “view” of the local or regional space.