Cecylia Malik

“Be a river! Choose your beloved childhood river or the one you pass every day on your way to work. It can be a large or a small one, a creek or a stream. Size doesn’t matter, they are all equally important. They carry water, they carry life. The same eternal water that we drink, or that is in our tears, and which came with meteorites from space. Dress in blue and join the River Sisters!” With these words, a hydrofeminist collective was born, initiated by the Krakow-based artist Cecylia Malik in 2017. It produces an ecology of resistance between art and activism in the form of tributes to the water and calls for action. 

On the Traisen, Cecylia Malik is installing what she calls a river invocation followed by a series of actions. This includes eighty boards with the names of rivers. There is the Traisen herself and her tributaries and many rivers important to the artists and the team of Tangente St. Pölten. And there are many rivers whose voices we want to hear, such as the Danube, Dnieper, Euphrates and Oder, or the Whanganui in New Zealand—the first river to be granted environmental personhood in 2017, the Vjosa in Albania, which was declared a national park in 2023, the Vistula, one of Europe’s wildest rivers, which is threatened by an E40 waterway, or the Sarno, the most poisoned river in Italy and Europe. 

Cecylia believes that giving rivers a legal personality is a paradigm shift that emancipates the aquatic ecosystem and the bloodstream of the Earth. Climate change is an alarm that is telling us humans to stop treating rivers as exploitable raw material and to treat them as living beings instead. The piece also shows the interdependent cycle of all the planet’s waters. The rivers flow from the mountains to the sea, mix with salt water and evaporate. The wind carries the clouds deep inland, where they fall as rain and snow before, later, refilling the springs and returning as rivers. And so the water of the Traisen can feed the source of the Orange River in Africa or the Rio de la Plata in Argentina and vice versa, again and again.  

Cecylia Malik (1975, Kraków) is a visual artist and environmental activist living in Kraków. Her work blends artistic practice with ecological campaigns and social activism. She generates social situations that easily become protest objects and are duplicated and employed by other participants, for articulating both the emotions and the demands of the people involved. For example „356 Trees“ (2009-2010), a performance in public space, in which she climbed a different tree each day throughout the year to defend one of the city’s most important green areas, or the „6 Rivers“ (2011-2012) in which she travelled on a handmade boat along all of the rivers of Kraków to save the natural channel of the Białka River. In 2017 she initiated the action “Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps”/”Polish Mothers at the Felling” against a law that allowed unregulated tree felling. She belongs to the “Save the Rivers” Coalition to fight against the plans of devastation and regulation of Poland’s rivers (“River Sisters”). She has won many awards including the Person of the Year of Polish Ecology Award (2017) and the Katarzyna Kobro Award (2018).