River Talk II
2nd July 2027
Silvia Franceschini is a curator and editor working across visual arts, design, and architecture. She is currently a curator at Kanal Architecture in Brussels and an associate curator at Onomatopee in Eindhoven, where she directs the exhibition and publication series Systems & Territories. She is also the co-founder of Celador, a space for art and writing in Brussels. Between 2018 and 2021, Franceschini was a curator at Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt. In 2015, she was part of the
curatorial team of The School of Kyiv. Kyiv Biennial 2015. She curated exhibitions and public programs in various private and public institutions, including the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Franceschini is an editor of Curator Without a System. Viktor Misiano: Selected Writings (Sternberg Press: 2022); The Politics of Affinity: Experiments in Art, Education and the Social Sphere (Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto: 2018); and Global Tools 1973–1975: When
Education Coincides with Life (Nero Publishing: 2019). She holds a PhD in design and visual cultures from the Polytechnic University of Milan, and was a research fellow at the Liverpool John Moores University and the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow.
Silvia Franceschini. Photo: Cosimo FIlippini. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Wacapou a prologue, or a room in my mother's house, 2018 Super8mm film transferred to 2K, 25mn01s. Film Still.
Hydrographies
Water flows through our lives as sustenance, border, weapon, and witness. The exhibition and publication Hydrographies brought together artists, activists, and
thinkers whose work engages water as a contested terrain, revealing how rivers, oceans, and aquifers are mobilized in contemporary struggles over land,
sovereignty, and survival. While geography etymologically, the writing of the earth—underpins the frameworks of contemporary geopolitics, hydrography is
reconceived in the exhibition as a fluid cartography through which common desires, shared struggles, and transnational solidarities can be reimagined.
At River Talk II, Silvia illustrates the work of artists and researchers who offer a conceptualization of water as a complex, dynamic archive, embodying a
desire to multiply narratives by weaving together temporalities, speculative fictions, mythologies, and languages. At a time when war and ecological breakdown intersect with unprecedented force—from the weaponization of water in zones of armed
conflict to the control of hydrological systems as tools of oppression—Hydrographies insists on reimagining our relationship to nature and communities through care and reciprocity, echoing what cultural theorist Ifor Duncan calls a “hydrology of the powerless.”
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River Talks are curated by Noor Ahmed, Martina Huber, and Anushka Rajendran for River Landscapes in collaboration with Karachi Biennale 2027, We Are AIA|Awareness in Art, and Prameya Art Foundation