WATERWAYS – ESSAYS & CONTEXT

INTRO – WATER & SOUND 2026

“Waterways – Canals, Sea Routes, Empire”

Waterways connect, lead through cities and landscapes, across seas and continents, through trade relations, memories and power relations. Canals, rivers and sea routes are not neutral lines on the map. They have given rise to cities, enabled industries, supported empires and set people, goods, languages and music in motion. At the same time, they tell of violence and exploitation, of migration and resistance and of the question of how much this history still shapes our present.

The Water & Sound Festival 2026 is dedicated to these waterways under the leitmotif “Waterways – Canals, Sea Routes, Empire”. The theme will have a special resonance in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Augsburg. The historic water management system with its canals, fountains, waterworks and power stations is itself a dense network of technology, urban development, craftsmanship and nature. From here, the festival focuses on larger contexts: from the Lech to the sea routes of colonial trade, from Augsburg’s canals to global infrastructures, from water as the basis of life to water as a medium of power, movement and memory.

The focus is on waterways as routes of trade, power and empire building. Straightened rivers, canals, ports and straits made transportation, control and expansion possible. Tea, sugar, cotton, coffee, cocoa and rubber became global commodities across the oceans, spreading botanical knowledge, new consumer habits, colonial labor regimes and lasting dependencies. Many of these connections continue to the present day: in supply chains, migration histories, ecological crises, cultural identities and digital networks.

Above all, however, Water & Sound makes these histories tangible through music. The festival presents artists from the current global music scene who do not preserve traditions as museums, but continue them in today’s sounds: with voices, rhythms, languages and timbres that combine local musical roots with improvisation, electronics, pop, jazz, rock, songwriting and experimental forms. In this way, waterways are not only narrated historically, but can be heard as musical movements here and now: as paths of migration, memory, exchange and renewal.

One of the special moments of the program is “Waterways Re:Imagined” at the Parktheater: an evening with Sathnam Sanghera, Laura Misch, Ganavya and the Water & Sound Ensemble that combines conversation, song, improvisation, field recordings and chamber music colors. Sathnam Sanghera opens our eyes to the aftermath of the British Empire; Laura Misch forms atmospheric songs from saxophone, voice, electronics and recordings of rivers and canals; Ganavya’s voice combines South Indian classical music, improvisation and spiritual presence to create a haunting musical language.

At Kuhsee and Annahof, the festival becomes an open meeting place for music, encounters and urban society. Daraa Tribes transform the musical traditions of the Draa Valley into a driving desert groove, Lala Tamar brings North African-Jewish memory, poetry and danceability into a contemporary form. At Annahof, Meral Polat and her quartet open up an intense sound space between Anatolian folk music, Kurdish poetry, blues and improvisational freedom; Mari Froes stands for the young, global lightness of a new Música Popular Brasileira; The Cavemen. celebrate highlife as a warm, elegant and danceable sound of the present; MELINA combines oud, voice and rebetiko traces with neo-traditional pop; and BCUC bring their ecstatic live energy from Soweto to Augsburg.

The installation “The Tea Chariot” in the former Dominican church of St. Magdalena adds a walk-in art and sound space to the festival. At the center is a living tea plant in a contemporary Wardian Case, surrounded by sound, cartography, light and space. The “Liquid Histories” panels delve deeper into the historical and political lines of the festival and range from the Danube as an imperial waterway to colonial water landscapes and Augsburg’s own fountains, canals and waterworks. With guided tours of the World Heritage Site and the water bird parade, the festival takes these perspectives further into the urban space.

Water & Sound 2026 invites you to experience waterways as sounding lines: as connections between cities and seas, local histories and global interdependencies, past and present.

Girisha Fernando. Artistic Director

CANAL MANIA

The end of the 18th century. The whole of Great Britain is gripped by canal-building fever. What was happening? Industrialization was gathering pace. Since James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine at the end of the 1760s, production, work and energy requirements have changed. The working class emerges, a new consumer culture grows, technologies develop rapidly. Unprecedented productivity requires constant supplies and new markets. Coal furnaces need to be heated, raw materials and goods need to be transported with increasing frequency. The country roads are bumpy in summer, muddy in winter. Pottery breaks before it reaches society’s tea rooms; heavy loads get stuck. The railroad has not yet been built. That leaves shipping: water is strong and gentle at the same time. It carries heavy freight such as coal and brings fragile goods to their destination undamaged.

The use of waterways has a long tradition in Great Britain. Even the Romans, masters of road and hydraulic engineering, are said to have built one of Britain’s oldest canals, the Foss Dyke, as an artificial link between Trent and Witham. But in the mid-18th century, hardly any rivers were designed for the intensive use that the new economic tempo demanded. Some overflow their banks, carry too much or too little water depending on the season, are surrounded by floodplains that are difficult to navigate or are simply not located where production and consumption take place.

Canal Mania changes all that: soon towns, estates and up-and-coming businesses want their own waterways. In 1761, the Duke of Bridgewater, impressed by the French Canal du Midi, had the Bridgewater Canal built in the northwest of England. Its purpose was to transport coal from the mines at Worsley directly to the emerging industrial centers, especially Manchester. The contract was awarded to James Brindley, a gifted engineer. In 1766, Brindley designed the Trent and Mersey Canal at the instigation of ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, so that delicate Staffordshire pottery could reach customers undamaged. A new profession gains importance: the canal engineer. The expertise of Brindley and others makes Great Britain a pioneer of this new infrastructure. They brought to the state of the art what many civilizations before them had tried to do: To organize and direct water and make it usable for trade.

An intricate network of artificial and paved waterways, supply lines, reservoirs, tunnels, bridges, dams, locks and ports soon emerged. Technical know-how transcends natural boundaries: ships sail high above valleys, water is routed through aqueducts or tunnels, lock stairs overcome differences in height. The canals are usually narrow, the boats often only a few feet wide, but many meters long. They transport raw materials, food, processed goods, animals and people. New worlds of work are emerging around them: Ferrymen, lock keepers, craftsmen, warehouse workers. Canal mania is giving rise to canal construction companies across the country and turning waterways into objects of speculation. Some projects go into debt, others become profitable. But all of them contribute to a dynamic that combines the spirit of innovation, speculation, expansion and economic interests.

The waterways are becoming trade arteries on which goods and people travel. Inland waterways are combined with overseas trade; local production with global raw materials and markets. Porcelain imported from China by the British East India Company inspires Josiah Wedgwood in Staffordshire, for example, to further develop his own models. This logic continued in the 19th century. Manchester, the “Cottonopolis” metropolis of cotton production, was connected to Liverpool and the Atlantic via canals, railroads and later the Manchester Ship Canal. Raw cotton from India, the Caribbean or North America enters the country via the port of Liverpool; coal from Worsley fuels the mechanical looms in Manchester. The finished textiles are exported globally.

In mercantilist thinking, the colonies appear as sources of raw materials and sales markets, as places of extraction and expansion. Economic strength consolidates power, whether as a successful entrepreneur or as an “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets”. The British Empire of the 18th and 19th centuries is a prime example of how closely economics, politics, technology and mastery of nature were linked. The idea of being able to plan, transform and utilize the world is also inscribed in the man-made waterways. In this way, water has supported and accompanied the expansion of an island nation. Its steady flow and unagitated splashing under the bow of the boats forms the underlying soundtrack to the rattling of the looms, the pounding of the steam engines and the babble of voices in the trading ports.

THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY

Blueprint for global corporate power

“Next to water, tea is the real element of the Englishman. All classes of society drink it …” This travel note from a Swedish guest in 1809 refers to a larger story: the tea leaves had traveled a long way to the Five o’Clock Tea in London, a good part of it by sea. The economic and political power of the British Empire in the 19th century extended over around a quarter of the world. It was based on a strong naval fleet and control of important global trade routes and hubs. The English East India Company, later usually referred to as the British East India Company, was the executing arm of British trade with Asia from 1600 onwards. Financed by shareholders, the Company was much more than a trading company that had been granted a monopoly by the Crown for the trade in spices, silk and tea. Its presence on the Indian subcontinent became a decisive political and military power factor for the British Empire.

The Company ousted European competitors, cooperated with local rulers of the Mughal Empire and established bases initially in port cities such as Surat or Masulipatam, later in Madras, Bombay / Mumbai and Calcutta / Kolkata. To the outside world, it claimed to have trade and market interests; in fact, the Company maintained its own army, waged wars of conquest, won the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and brought Bengal under its control. From there, it expanded its sphere of influence on the Indian subcontinent and into other parts of Asia. As a colonial power, it levied duties and taxes, secured trading privileges and increasingly pursued its own political agenda. From the 17th century onwards, it was also involved in the trade in enslaved people and used various forms of forced labor. Hunger, impoverishment and the destruction of local economic structures were accepted.

Of all things, the business with tea, which was so popular in England, initially remained expensive. China held on to its monopoly and exchanged tea almost exclusively for silver. To compensate for this trade deficit, the Company entered into the smuggling of Indian opium to China. The resulting conflicts led to the Opium Wars and forcibly opened up China to British trading interests. At the same time, the Company began to establish British-controlled tea plantations in Assam and later also in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. It was not until the Indian Rebellion of 1857/58 that the Company’s administrative sovereignty came to an end. With the Government of India Act of 1858, India became a crown colony of the British Empire and was placed under the direct control of the British Crown. Until its dissolution in 1874, the East India Company had dominated trade routes for more than two hundred years, developed raw materials for industrialization and made so-called colonial goods a part of everyday European culture. At the same time, it created infrastructures, organized power over sea routes and ports and intervened deeply in economies, ecosystems and biographies.

THE ECONOMY OF THE PLANTATION

The term plantation carries a colonial legacy: the English plantation originally referred to a settlement overseas. It was around such settlements that the large agricultural monocultures that changed global trade routes, working conditions and consumer habits were later established. According to Edgar T. Thompson, the plantation can be understood as an institution on the frontier, integrated into an interplay between center and periphery. This pattern was already established in the Renaissance: Sugar cane cultivation in Cyprus as a Venetian colony was organized according to the needs of the metropolis, with the profits flowing into the center.

With the crossing of the oceans from the early modern period onwards, this dynamic of expansion and extraction expanded into a complex global trade network. Thousands of nautical miles could lie between production and value creation, cultivation and consumption. The economy of the plantation was based on forced labor, monoculture, hierarchy, area intensity and export orientation. Its history cannot be told without the transatlantic slave trade: Millions of people were deported to perform forced labor. Less than eight percent of cotton imports for the burgeoning British textile industry around 1803 came from farms run by farmers themselves; the majority came from plantation slavery in the North American southern states, the reality of which remained largely invisible to customers in Europe. Modern forms of exploitation are still part of this legacy today.

The plantation economy also includes a history of transplantation: of seeds, knowledge, techniques and people. Sugar cane came from Asia via the Arab world to the Mediterranean region from the 8th century onwards, and from there to Portuguese and Spanish colonies; rubber seeds were smuggled from Brazil to South East Asia by a British adventurer in 1876. However, the plantation never existed in the middle of nowhere. It interacted with existing systems and profoundly changed ecosystems, social structures and landscapes. Monocultures affect biodiversity, food webs, habitats, soils and water supplies; they displace indigenous practices and small-scale agriculture. The plantation is a resource-intensive system. The costs are often not borne by those who export, import or consume.

Tobacco, sugar, coffee, cocoa: many of today’s commodities have a history of migration that would hardly be conceivable without sea routes. Their systematization since the early modern era has intensified the exchange between continents, making cultures more hybrid and borders more fluid. Production processes and supply chains could extend across several continents. Distance and entanglement, expansion and exploitation: this shows the oscillation of the plantation economy, made possible by a trade network that linked distant places, populations and ecosystems. From a bird’s eye view, the regions of the world today appear to be connected by multiple intersecting lines: Sea routes, trade arteries and, in their legacy, pipelines and data cables. For a long time, Europe was thought to be at the center of these connections; today they are global agglomerations of capital and technology, no longer just in the Global North. The forms have changed. The question of who benefits from these connections and who bears their costs remains.

SUEZ CANAL AND MARITIME “CHOKEPOINTS”

Nodes of global interdependence

In October 1956, France, Great Britain and Israel began a military intervention against Egypt. One of the aims was to regain control of the Suez Canal. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had previously nationalized the canal, placing a symbol of colonial and economic influence under Egyptian control. In the shadow of the Cold War, the Western powers saw not only the free right of passage under threat, but also their political and economic presence in the Middle East. The intervention failed politically: international criticism grew, the USA reacted with financial pressure and the troops soon had to be withdrawn. The Suez Crisis is often regarded as a turning point in the history of European imperialism.

At the same time, it highlighted the geostrategic importance of maritime chokepoints for trade, energy supply and political influence. In addition to the Suez Canal, these include the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca and the Strait of Hormuz. Currently, around ten percent of global trade passes through the Suez Canal; a significant proportion of the world’s oil trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. These bottlenecks bundle flows of goods, energy sources and raw materials for agriculture and industry. Their vulnerability became particularly apparent in 2021 when the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for days. Technical disruptions, accidents, piracy or geopolitical conflicts can have tangible consequences far beyond the region in question. At the same time, the high density of shipping traffic has an ecological impact, for example through emissions, underwater noise or the spread of alien species via ballast water and ship hulls.

The maritime infrastructure that sustains modern everyday life is particularly noticeable when it fails. It was never a matter of course. Until the middle of the 19th century, sailing ships still had to sail around the Cape of Good Hope to get from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The idea of an artificial connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea dates back to the Pharaohs; after concessions were granted in the 1850s, the canal was built between 1859 and 1869 by the International Suez Canal Company as a French-Egyptian geoengineering project, linked to the vision of global free trade. This initially benefited the British Empire in particular, with its extensive maritime trade and colonies in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The canal considerably shortened the route between Europe and South Asia and became one of the most important waterways for world trade. Commissioned in 1869, the Suez Canal is still being expanded today. Labor and power struggles were already taking place during its construction. The canal changed the ecosystems of the newly connected seas, the shipping routes and the mode of transportation itself: It was no longer wind and water, but fossil fuels, first coal and later oil, that drove industrialization, the ships on which their products still travel today, and also some of the crises that occur around maritime chokepoints

Texts: Myriam Kammerlander

Photo above: Girisha Fernando

Illustrations: Alexandra Blon