Source to Sea (S > S) is an evolving project by international artist collective Futurefarmers which engages with the River Thames as a dynamic web of energies and relations shaped by “power": tidal, ecological, technological, and social.
An initial phase of research will take the form of a river journey. Under the sail of Morwenna, Futurefarmers will move upstream with invited artists, a geologist, a mineralogists, a radical archivist, a printmaker and technofeminist, connecting lived experience with scientific and historical knowledge.
The group will centre their research around collecting (salt) water and mud visiting sites of latent potential to form an emergent, river-length network of signals
S>S draws on to Thames’ long history as a corridor of trade, transport, and exchange – a river that once moved goods, people, cultures, and stories between local communities and global routes. It responds to this lineage of circulation by creating a new kind of river-borne network, powered not by fossil infrastructure but by the saline vitality of the water itself.
Rather than extracting power from the river, the project reflects on how power already moves through bodies, estuaries, cables, tides, archives, and atmospheres. The artists consider energy not as commodity, but as relation: something shared, negotiated, accumulated, and transformed across human and more-than-human worlds.