through participatory
art, science and policy
The project explores the transition from chaotic and unintentional water consumption to a thoughtful, culturally and scientifically informed interaction with the water as living resource and legacy.
The name Voda Má emerges from the Czech „voda má“ – “water has” or “my water”, and a sound that evokes a primal “water mother” association in Indo-European roots. This ambiguity carries the conceptual core of the project: water as origin, bearer, and living force. The phrase appears in the song “Modlitba za vodu” (“Prayer for Water”) by Jan Skácel and the Hradišťan band, which the authors want to position as the headliner for the project. The song evokes image of a woman walking to a river or spring to fetch water – a quiet archetypal image from collective memory. With a vessel in her hands, she embodies care, continuity, and everyday ritual; and at the same time - the river herself. Reimagined today, this figure steps from the riverbank into the city – into treatment plants, public debates, and artistic spaces – reminding us that modern water systems still depend on the same gestures of care and responsibility.
The central metaphor guides the project’s activities: each workshop and event invites people to reconnect with the embodied river that quietly flows through their lives.
Public Workshops and Dialogues
The core of the project will be a series of participatory workshops held in different locations along the river network. These events are not traditional lectures. Instead, they combine conversation, creativity, and practical reflection. Participants may include residents, artists, students, water professionals, local authorities, and businesses connected to water management. Bringing these groups together in the same space allows everyday experiences, technical knowledge, and cultural imagination to meet. Each workshop will explore water from a different perspective. One session may invite participants to draw or paint their own image of the river, expressing how they experience water in their daily lives. Another may explore “the journey of water”, tracing how it travels from mountain sources to cities, households, treatment plants, and eventually back to nature. Other sessions will focus on new ideas for caring for water, encouraging dialogue between citizens and decision-makers.
Art, Story, Infrastructure and Insight
Art plays an important role in the project. Music, drawing, storytelling, and movement will be used to make complex water topics accessible and memorable. Through these creative methods, participants can imagine the river as a shared personality – something that flows through communities and generations.
At the same time, the workshops will highlight the real infrastructure and decisions that shape our relationship with water. Discussions with utility providers, researchers, and policymakers will help participants understand how water systems work and where collective action is possible.
Sharing Knowledge
The ideas, artworks, and insights generated during the workshops will be collected and shared through an online River Library – a digital space where art, knowledge, and stories about the river can continue to flow and inspire others.
In this way, the project connects imagination with practical awareness, helping people rediscover water not only as a resource, but as a living thread that ties communities together.
We have submitted a proposal to a grant call "PartArt4OW" which is fostering participatory artistic and creative initiatives to tackle ocean and water basin challenges.
We dedicated our pilot to the river Elbe (Labe). In the future, we want to replicate the idea to other rivers and seek other financing.
Our Elbe-Labe concept:
The River Elbe (Czech "Labe"), a transboundary waterway connecting the Czech Republic and Germany and flowing into the North Sea. The Elbe is viewed not simply as a river, but as a cultural axis connecting the Slavic and Germanic worlds, ecological systems, water management economies, and everyday life.
Key cultural and hydrological nodes of the project:
Vltava (Prague, Czechia)
Havel (Berlin region, Germany)
Krkonoše National Park, town of Mělník, town of Havelberg, city of Cuxhaven.
The great river Elbe begins in the Krkonoše mountains in northern Czechia. Its tributary Vltava originates in Southern Czechia, passes through the capital city of Prague and then flows into the Elbe at the town of Mělník. Everything passing through these waters — materially, culturaly and metaphorically — continues downstream into Germany.
The German capital city Berlin, with its southern part situated on Havel river and interconnected lakes, joins Elbe at the town of Havelberg.
Czech and German cultural and economic narratives and legacy of two capital cities unite in a great river. But Elbe is even bigger than that. It forms a continuous hydrological organism stretching from Czech mountains through German plains and to the North Sea; and a continuous historic and cultural entity, weaving myths of Germanic and Slavic tribes through centuries.
Objectives:
Environmental: increasing water literacy, awareness of transboundary responsibility, understanding the water cycle “from tap to sea”.
Cultural: creating new contemporary river folklore, reimagining the image of water through music,
visual art, performance, and fostering an emotional connection with the river.
Social: creating horizontal links between communities in the Czech Republic and Germany, involving local communities, artists, activists, and developing community-based projects approach.
Economic: understanding the economics of water: distribution, purification, use, dialogue with municipal structures and water supply services, research of water infrastructure as a cultural phenomenon.
- recommend grant sources to us
- call us to speak at an event
- co-create a concept for the next bioregion and river
- create pro bono art with Voda Má theme
- connect us to musicians, painters and other aritsts
- connect us to city authorities and utilities
- post about the concept on your social media
- take pictures, notes and thoughts about water cycle and share them
- go walk by a river and communicate with her
Write to us to learn more and participate!
Partners and interested viewers of Alena’s projects include UNDP, OSCE, OSUN (Open Society University Network), and many others.
Natalia has collaborated with development institutions such as the World Bank, UNDP, EBRD and with new paradigm sustainability and regenerative projects such as Dobrosphera, Fito network, etc.
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