showing people in the city as they walk by that a space has dimensions, has time, and that water flows through the city with time and makes the city negotiable, tangible; it makes a difference if you do something or not . . . the idea of the city not being a picture. (TED 2009) In an interview between Eliasson and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist about Green River, Obrist proposed that the artist’s idea . . . was to make the city visible for its inhabitants, who no longer take any notice of the way it works or what’s special about it. What you did was aimed at challenging their perception of their environment as something changeless and reassuring. (Obrist 2002) To this, Eliasson responded: Right. I wanted to get a fix on how the river is perceived in the city. Is it something dynamic or static? Something real or just a representation? I wanted to make it present again, get people to notice its movement and turbulence. For a few minutes there it was “hyperreal”. (Eliasson in Obrist 2002) In the interview, Eliasson also explained how the first of these projects originated, and that he prefers to carry out his public acts of interventionist practice with no advance notice or media, so that it appears to be spontaneous. This spontaneity gives his work not only a sense of surprise, but, as Obrist detected, creates a rift in the normality of urban existence. Like a flash flood or an oil spill, there is little warning; this is not akin to the highly anticipated and closely tracked landfall of a hurricane, but rather the unexpected groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). It’s the corollary, the collateral damage from previous action
exercised elsewhere, temporally or physically. Although Eliasson acknowledged the risk he took in executing the work (that the project might not work properly; that he might be stopped by passers-by from putting the colouring powder in the river), I posit that an intervention work such as Green River deals with the concept of risk, and how risk is identified or ignored in relation to how we interact with our environment. In turn, risk is part of what defines or transforms a place into a contested place; a river becomes contested when it goes “wrong”. One scenario Green River clearly references is the possibility of an urban river becoming contaminated; the acid green Eliasson used is symbolic of extreme impurity, even poison. If such a scenario were to occur, the river would become a site of contestation, causing a cascade of questions that demand answers: where the source of the poison was located, who was allowed near the river while it was in this state, what resources could be drawn from the river, what any downstream effects would be to all life forms, and what avoidable risks (known or unknown; overt or covert) were taken that caused the contamination. Green River speaks of risk that results in a sudden and dramatic change to a place, possibly irreversible, and certainly indicative of something amiss. While the effect of dramatic change may cause a place to become a contested zone, so does the anticipation of dramatic change to an area. Risk can be characterised as dramatic change with a negative complexion: the fear that things will be not be as they were, of loss. Authors such as Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch examine the concept of risk in cultural and social theory and how this has changed over time (Lupton 1999; Tulloch and Lupton 2003), while artists such as Lucy Bleach work with the concept of risk through an ephemeral sculptural practice; Bleach researches communities who live close to volcanoes (Bleach 2012). When I returned to Tasmania and began working at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania, I found myself situated in a floodplain—a contested space where policy about who could use the area and how was being written, abandoned, and rewritten—and I became intrigued with the issues of risk, power, and responsibility that such contested
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startling landscape that was at once beautiful in its psychedelic colouring and frightening in its revelation of the city’s river as a living thing that may have suddenly become contaminated. His interest was in