The exhibition is divided into sections: Aridity, Rain, Glaciers, Surface Water and Groundwater. Surprisingly, rivers are not given their own space. But they flow through the exhibition, which begins with a Babylonian clay tablet from around 1900—1600 bc, on which the Epic of Gilgamesh is inscribed in cuneiform. It describes the first war waged over water in ancient Mesopotamia, the ‘land between rivers’ — the Tigris and Euphrates. Later comes a section on the Iraqi Marshes, including filmed interviews with their inhabitants. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the swamps were drained to about 10% of their original size by the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, to evict the people living there — but have since been partially rejuvenated.
Videos feature people across the globe wading speechlessly through their houses after flooding, exploring human experiences of the phenomenon. A satirical cartoon from 1828, entitled ‘Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water’, shows a horrified woman peering through her microscope, studying numerous creatures swimming about in a drop of drinking water from London’s River Thames. Another drawing, made in 1931, shows a cross-section of an artesian tube well drilled beneath the Wellcome Collection building into one of London’s many underground rivers.
Other contributors to the exhibition book, some of whom also feature in the exhibition, include science-minded thinkers — such as environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who founded Navdanya, an Indian non-governmental organization that promotes biodiversity conservation; Native American Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist at the State University of New York College in Syracuse; and Anthony Acciavatti, a scholar at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who works at the intersection of landscape and the history of science and technology. Writers and artists, including British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong and the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, provide vivid snapshots of freshwater and its behaviour. But, oddly, the book contains no photographs or maps of rivers, as crucially displayed in Macfarlane’s book.
