Nowadays, we live in a state of constant negotiation between the nature and people, in the times of dangerous climate changes and crisis, pandemic, and wars. Our project – „Aquacritical Vistula” is to show how multifaceted are all of those tensions, and to indicate the rivers’ place in them.
Why Vistula? Because it flew through the areas of Poland in all three Partitions, connecting that what is national with regional. Even now, the Vistula can help understand the ecological culture of Poland and that is what the project is directed at. Its goal is to create a literary map of riverine references in the context of ecocritical, memory, and ecohistorical studies. We strive to depict a complex and intertextual model of the river, constituting Polish and European heritage, both cultural and environmental. We want to show a deep map of the Vistula River, which flows down the country horizontally, but also goes across peoples’ traumas of wars and floods. Each close reading will add to our collective knowledge on the living river – the Vistula.

The Aquacritical Vistula Team