About the project

Writing the River Rising is a solo experience that contributes to a community experience. We are creating it together. It is a meditation on grief, on change, on community, on becoming ourselves, and a very personal response to the recent Riverland flooding event and my (very) personal history of living and loving the Riverland.

I feel like this work is unfinished. Like I need to give it more time to polish and settle and sing. But I could spend another month, two, six, more, and it would still feel unfinished. Just like this flood, with its impacts and echoes still here with us, unfinished.

We are all works in progress. Thank you for being unfinished with me.

With love
Alysha Herrmann

Writing the River Rising is an interactive digital writing project conceived by Alysha Herrmann and commissioned by Country Arts SA with support from the Government of South Australia through Arts South Australia. The Sandpit team have designed and built the digital interface and backend to bring to life Alysha’s vision. Alysha would like to thank all of the team at Sandpit and Country Arts SA, and a special thank you to friend and collaborator Daniel Giles for creating illustrations in response to Alysha’s concept.

Each day over the course of a month people in the Riverland are invited to visit one of the five project locations to reveal a new poem and answer a new question using their personal mobile device. Each day the poems and responses will slowly create and fill an ephemeral web-based artwork (the desktop experience you are currently at) before receding to reveal a final poem and returning back to the empty page we started with.

Writing the River Rising has been written in response to the digital documentation and physical experience of the 2022/2023 Riverland flood event, including flood watch email alerts, public facebook updates from all levels of government and emergency services, community FB groups like River Murray Floodwatch, and Alysha’s own documentation and experience of the floods while they were happening (including photos, phone notes, text messages to friends etc).

Credits
Concept/Writer: Alysha Herrmann
Illustrator: Daniel Giles
Augmented reality, audience interface, digital solutions and website build: Sandpit
Commissioning Producer: Country Arts SA

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