Water has shaped the lives and stories of past and future generations across the Forth Water Basin for generations. Our work in Cultural and Natural Heritage seeks to gather and preserve stories, creating a living record of people’s experiences with water, while imagining new futures for the region.
Key Activities:
Water Story Map and Water Futures Scenarios Workshops
We are gathering stories and creating dialogue of people’s lived experiences, cultural and natural heritage, ecological perspectives and imagined water futures from across the Forth Water Basin and bringing these together in an online Water Story Map.
Co‑created with communities, third‑sector organisations and creative practitioners, the Water Story Map will showcase a rich collection of water stories that are often overlooked, weaving together more-than-human, intangible cultural and natural heritage, environmental knowledge and speculative visions of the future.
Alongside this, our Water Futures Scenarios Workshops invite participants to explore and imagine alternative water futures through artist‑facilitated, creative and participatory processes. These workshops use speculative, narrative and creative methods to surface new ways of thinking about water. The workshop contributions, ranging from co‑created narratives and material or visual pieces to soundscapes, performances and other forms shaped through artists’ interpretive practices, feed directly into the Story Map and inform the direction of our wider programme of commissioned artworks.
Working with a Lead Artist, artist‑facilitators, commissioned artists and a videographer, the project brings together curation, storytelling and creative practice to support communities in expressing their relationships with water and imagining the futures they want to see for themselves, the other species that depend on water, and the watery places they co-inhabit.
Workshops and Creative Artefacts
We explore the cultural and natural significance of water through participatory workshops, artist‑led activities and speculative artefacts created in response to the Water Futures Scenarios Workshops. These commissions reflect the lived experiences, heritage narratives and future visions of communities across the Forth Water Basin. Together they offer fresh ways to understand, experience and imagine the region’s water futures.
Optimisation Challenges
Harnessing water resources productively and sustainably in the Forth Water Basin.