A river is a complex landscape, where almost everything moves constantly on different time scales. A landscape migrates, forming new assemblages as its components change: Ground, air, water and organisms. The acceleration of environmental change is one of the defining features of the Anthropocene.

Engineering of the Sangro River in southern Abruzzo, Italy, was a transformative event in its history, but infrastructural interventions do not freeze time. Movement persists, though flows and processes are inevitably distorted, slowed and accelerated. Landscapes respond to restrictions by changing, sometimes through sudden and unwanted events.

The Sangro Basin is a suitable site to study landscape migration in the Anthropocene. The basin’s complex water systems — dams, cemented channels, weirs and power stations — provide strong evidence of human history. The terrain is such that various geomorphological processes can be surveyed in situ.

How do we develop a reciprocal relationship between human and non-human: The river itself? How do we face the constantly changing landscape, especially in the era of the Anthropocene? This project is not about how to complete the restoration of a cemented channel, rather how human activities interact with nature in this new and changing era.