‘As Water Stands Still’ is landscape-focused research that investigates how traditional activities such as salt farming and milkfish farming shaped the delta and coastal area of Tainan and how their gradual abandonment in the past 30 years reshaped spatial, social, and economic dynamics.
Through walking, filming, carrying out archival research, talking to local former fishers turned oyster farmers, and local researchers, I gathered stories and translated them into moving images and poetic narratives that opened up hued reflections on the relational and transitional nature of Tainan’s delta landscape.
Tainan’s delta, abundant in fish and naturally protected by marshlands and mangrove forests, was shaped throughout three centuries to accommodate milkfish farms, oyster farms and salt pans, the latter also holding strong colonial ties both to the Netherlands and Japan. These array of specific and densely diffused activities shaped vast wetland areas characterised by regular, rectangular, shallow ponds and evaporation tanks, often outlined by earth embankments or brick ones. The use of bricks was introduced by the Dutch during their colonial period in Taiwan (1624-1662), the bricks spread quickly due to the high clay availability and the low production costs and rapidly became a prominent element of these wetscapes.
These Interwoven elements and dynamics shaped a specific type of spatial production revolving around the socioeconomic relationship with water and the activities tied to it. As a consequence when these activities shifted, space reconfigured itself through new forms, uses, and ecosystems reshaping the wetlands. In this specific case, due to economic transformations, a rising presence of microchip factories, a bigger import of salt from China, and higher pollution and climate change putting fish stocks at risk, the activities that landmarked the Tainan delta partially or totally ceased to exist. Salt pans were officially closed in 2001, abandoned or reconverted to tourist attractions, and fish farmers and fishers moved to oyster farming, a more profitable activity, and ecotourism.
What is the new space that appears? How do the traces of past hydrosocial relations integrate into it, and what does their role become? In some cases salt pans became theme parks filled with colourful statues, sightseeing trains. Other times they became quiet fishing ponds for local people, and in others they were turned into open-air museums to keep the memory of salt production alive, crystallizing tradition into a reenacted historical artifact. Fish farms became a series of square-shaped oases for other species, filling up with all types of herons and small amphibians and slowly. The landscape transformed, letting go of the forces that shaped it to make spaces for new relations, becoming the place where all the historical, ecological, and social processes merge, materialize and keep shifting and evolving.
The project was supported by
Stimuleringfunds, Taipei Dutch
office and Taiwan government.