This work is available to view online only.

Changing Ideas Award
"Bodies in Water" is at its core a film engaging with climate collapse, the issue of access to rivers, and the difficulties of negotiating with authorities when loving a person from another country. It touches upon the artist’s queer experiences and the cultural links between mermaid myths and the fluidity of gender/genderlessness. It questions the practices of farming, keeping and eating fish.

Made while on residency with Connecting Threads – the cultural strand of Destination Tweed, the film began as a web of ideas around the residency’s theme, Watery Commons. Conversations around the communality of water, access rights (or lack of), and cultural significance of them fed into the film.
The somatic sensation of being in the Tweed and its tributaries - whether as human, animal, or as mythical creature provides structure. In ten chapters, with diary-style narrations from three characters and locations switching from being amongst the Salmon, Minnow and Trout in the Tweed to fish in a pet shop in Arkansas, USA. The characters – one present-day, one in-between, and one in a future, explore the River Tweed in their own ways – physically, dreamily, and historically through an archive.

The film speculates on future of access to the river and on its inhabitants, with a conversation between imagined generations about conservation, biodiversity, and the strange directions our rivers could go in. It neither seeks to make a rosy portrait of the future, nor a dystopian view, rather something a little sillier, sparking conversations about how we could be a part of protecting our environment that might be weirder and queerer than conventional approaches. It aims to highlight the disastrous effects human industry has already had on the river’s populations, especially the Atlantic Salmon, and to be another tile in the mosaic of communicating that change needs to happen.