About the Exhibition
Do rivers speak?
The Mekong River flows through various countries in Mainland Southeast Asia: Southern China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. At its peak, 475 billion cubic meters of water course through 4,800 kilometers of river. Though it is the twelfth longest river in the world, the Mekong River is the second most biodiverse and the most productive for freshwater fishery. Mainland Southeast Asia comprises a relatively small part of the world, but the Mekong River Basin produces rice, fish, and food products for export that feed and nourish communities across the globe.
A site of astonishing ecological abundance, the river both sustains and is nourished by more than 65 million people, who are members of more than 70 ethno-linguistic communities. While diverse in forms of communication and culture, the communities are connected by the ways they listen to and live with the Mekong River.
This exhibition was born out of the Mekong Culture WELL project, an interdisciplinary, collaborative, and multilingual initiative at Michigan State University that foregrounds cultural dimensions of water, ecologies, land, and livelihoods across Mainland Southeast Asia. MSU itself sits on the Red Cedar River Watershed, a diverse ecosystem of grasslands, wetlands, forests, agriculture, and urbanized area. By using the concept of ecosystems, which are deeply entangled and unbound by lines on maps, Mekong Voices shares the role of traditional craft, eco-art, and “artivism” as a means of translating and echoing themes of environmentalism, Indigeneity, identity, community, knowledge, and culture. In learning to listen to the rivers, we will also learn how to better care for them, and ourselves, in the process.
Mekong Voices: Transnational River Justice in Mainland Southeast Asia is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and co-curated by Marina Pok, Chairwoman, Anicca Foundation; Kelsey Merreck Wagner, Ph.D. candidate, MSU Department of Anthropology; Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez, Assistant Curator; Dr. Amanda Flaim, Associate Professor, MSU Department of Sociology; and Steven L. Bridges, Interim Director & Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Endowed Exhibitions Fund. The Mekong Culture WELL Project is generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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