G.A.D.W.E.S.

Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines

Monthly Newsletter, March, 2027

Welcome:

Welcome to the monthly newsletter for the Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines. We are delighted to share in the narrative slippages and subsidence of coastal edges with you.

This newsletter includes an exciting announcement regarding the establishment of our new Bivalvic Allegiance Division (B.A.D.), as well as snapshots of research activities, opportunities for members, and upcoming events in your area. There’s lots to get stuck into, so please sink in as we host your collective attention towards the textual disturbances of tidal interventions.

It is the ambition of Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines (G.A.D.W.E.S.), to collectively narrate ongoing littoral shifts as a result of coastal stabilisation projects, changes in siltation due to up- and downstream expulsions, and the annexing of land-water in archi-aquatic subdivisions. Such narrative gestures do not aim at the re-stabilising of shifting shores or at a global uniformity of written edges. Instead, we at G.A.D.W.E.S. together problematise the construction of narratives fixed in the concrete footings and rebar fractals of ports, piers, and jetties. Through embodied positioning in the turbidities of submerged construction sites, limited vision due to resuspended sediment, and the felt effects of noise-intensities from underwater drilling into bedrock, our members write into the tactilities and grit of rearranged shores.

G.A.D.W.E.S. is a shared attempt at thickening coastal environments in accumulations of written narrative, to muddy the waters of textual edges. Written geographies of shorelines are contingent on fictional accounts of watery boundaries as secure, measurable, and fixed. Shorelines represent the graphic stabilising of territory into legislative policy. Such writing designates water as a global set of interconnected passageways that facilitate geographic imaginaries of conquest and capital. The myth of the land-water binary is undone by the shore, where tidal difference, erosion, and increasing coastal development change both the shape of the land, and the requirements of any narrative practice of writing land-water distinctions.

This global network is aimed at developing narrative techniques for writing liquid edges, where localised industries, ecologies, and materialities are churned by currents and eroded into particulate configurations of text, before being logged and analysed by our licenced members. Our member community is vast, and we welcome applications throughout the year.

Announcement: Bivalvic Allegiance Division

G.A.D.W.E.S. is thrilled to announce our newly established Bivalvic Allegience Division (B.A.D.).

B.A.D. is an arm of G.A.D.W.E.S. tasked with narrative collection through engagement with bivalve digestive processes, which masticate land-water borders. Working closely with bivalve communities buried in composite muds B.A.D. writes through the toxicities registered by bodies during periods of shoreline alteration. As bivalves are uniquely positioned within the benthic sediments that compose and recompose coastal ecologies, B.A.D. is a practical working group engaged in the recording and distribution of fine-grained narratives inscribed by deposit-feeders.

B.A.D. is particularly interested in the possibility of inhabiting border-politics differently, through an embodiment of toxic configurations produced during land-water developments. The B.A.D. arm of G.A.D.W.E.S. does this specifically through engagement with the digestive tracts of bivalves as a way of practicing shored-narratives as embodied sites of toxicity and turbidity.

Over the coming months, we will publish regular snapshots of B.A.D. activities, highlighting emerging narratives written through the guts of bivalvic representatives. Congratulations to all involved in the creation of this exciting new initiative.

Case Study:

The Royal Seaport, Stockholm, offers a rare set of conditions whereby the bivalve Macoma balthica (otherwise known as M. balthica) populates brackish waters. Here, M. balthica enacts a tendency to bioaccumulate, through ingestion, the residual heavy metals and contaminants of past industry along with the present-day effects of urban planning and gentrification. i.e., they eat the littoral excesses of material-spatial capital.

The specific social, economic, and ecological environment of the Seaport at present offers an optimum locale for beginning our bivalvic explorations of hydro-socio arrangements. Over a five-year timeline, we will enlist licenced members in the Royal Seaport vicinity to engage in bivalvic outreach for the development of digestive shoreline narratives in consultation with M. balthica.

Buried up to 20cm below the bed surface, the M. balthica extends their dual syphons into the water in order to access food. Their largely sedentary disposition, along with their disinterest in avoiding contaminated environments, leads M. balthica to consume whatever heavy sediments are within their immediate proximity. Their digestive system thus images the turbations that take place within the coastal benthos where they live: excavations, discharges, and intrusions, as a result of coastal development.

Each new jetty, port, or shoring project of the Seaport, is chemically stored in the leachates that mark the guts of M. balthica. This process is accumulative, with M. balthica eating a continual arrangement of past contaminants (in this case fragments of mercury, copper, lead, zinc, and arsenic, leftover by Stockholm’s industrial age), along with current material shifts produced in daily sediment transport and largescale construction works. M. balthica churns these multiple material-temporal fusings within their stomach to create a micro-imaging of coastal transformation that eats land and water together.

From present to December 2027, B.A.D. will facilitate group excursions throughout the Royal Seaport of Stockholm, while also enlisting the expertise of licenced local members of G.A.D.W.E.S. to undertake technical narrative research in the area.

What is… dredging?

Dredging is a commonly used technique of scraping, sucking, and grabbing matter from the water’s bed and displacing it during development and land-reclamation projects. As sediment becomes resuspended it enters water systems and is distributed amongst the digestive tracts of watery inhabitants and rearranges currents over time. There are two main types of dredging: ‘capital’ dredging, where a new area of a riverbed, ocean floor, or harbour is dredged for the first time, and ‘maintenance’ dredging, where areas of ground beneath water bodies are repeatedly dredged in order to maintain continuous depths. ‘Capital’ dredging disturbs sediment, ecologies, geologies, and water flows, that may have formed over long durations—thousands or millions of years of built-up matter—and hydrodynamics that move and move through these temporal stabilisations. During ‘maintenance’ dredging, tidal flows, river movements, and floods, carry material from different directions and deposit it in the grooves and holes left by dredging, these areas are re-dredged, again and again and again, in order to hold such depths in some form of consistency.

Upcoming Events

28th March: Register now for our annual conference, where G.A.D.W.E.S.’s international network of writers come together to think across oceans and seas, along shorelines and coasts, through narrative accumulations between land and water. All welcome and free to attend.

April-May: Join us along your local intertidal zone to witness M. balthica’s annual spawning event during springtime neap tides.

9th June: B.A.D. first group diving/wading/swimming/floating excursion will take place at Royal Seaport, Stockholm.

Date: 03-06-2027
Licence number: 2201AQ1313
Issuing office: Royal Seaport/STHLM/SE

Dear- HARUN MORRISON

Re: Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines—Bivalvic Allegiance Division

Please find enclosed your temporary licence to operate under the G.A.D.W.E.S. Bivalvic Allegiance Division. This document provides provisional clearance to authorised dive sites in your registered area, access to the Association’s extensive research archive, and complimentary refreshments at all official and unofficial G.A.D.W.E.S. gatherings.

As a newly appointed member, you are required to make contact with your local bivalve representatives—in this case M. balthica—through one or more of following means: diving, swimming, wading, floating. According to satellite data retrieved from public access applications, your nearest diving vessel—call sign: SGYX, MMSI: 265628610, length x breadth: 18m x 6m—is located at 59.35946, 18.1026. Alternatively, there are areas of the shore that allow for a gentle descent into the water, south of the port, walking along tiny, pebbled beaches and through grassy marshes. Remember that in cool weather the soles of your feet will be more tender to the pressure of the pebbles, and any mud will retain an extra iciness against your skin. The brackish water will soon wash away this feeling, although it is recommended that any and all submersions take place within summer months. Additionally, M. balthica spawn in late spring, and are most active during periods of warmth.

In the establishment of a relationship between M. balthica and yourself, questions of how bivalve bodies register changes in water quality, salinity, sedimentation and filtration, during material and spatial transformations of shorelines, will open up ways of thinking against the assumed clarity of land-based waterside development, towards narrations of littoral spaces as murky and complicated. Using whatever notation systems you see fit, encounters with M. balthica will be recorded and logged within the Associationresearch archive, contributing to unfolding narrative accounts of shoreline ecologies globally. Instructions on how to upload any data you acquire will be sent to you as a separate document.

We would like to take this moment to formally welcome you to the Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines—Bivalvic Allegiance Division—and look forward to your continued involvement.

Kind Regards,

Therese Keogh
[official G.A.D.W.E.S. clerk]

GLOSSARY

B.A.D.

The Bivalvic Allegiance Division is the newest collective established by G.A.D.W.E.S. Together, members work with bivalve communities to develop narrative relationships between the digestive tracts of bivalves, and large-scale shoreline development.

Bivalvic

Referring to the set of embodied and material conditions created by both individual bivalves, and bivalve communities.

Coast

Coasts describe an area of land adjoining a sea or ocean. Such adjoining is dynamic and changeable. The term coast also describes a mode of physical, material, or figurative travel, referring to a sense of smoothness and ease that is felt.

Diving

Although generally understood as either swimming with a breathing apparatus, or throwing one’s body elegantly from above to beneath the water’s surface, here ‘diving’ is used as a term for an embodied practice of being in water. This can include activities like; floating, wading, sitting, swimming, and splashing about.

Dredge

A method of changing water depths by removing material from sea-/river-/lake-beds.

G.A.D.W.E.S.

The Global Association of Divers for the Written Extension of Shorelines is a fictional network of storytellers invested in the collective narration of littoral zones.

Sediment

The particulate matter that settles into position at the bottom of water bodies, or becomes suspended in the water column as a result of movement. Sediment likewise moves through, and rests in, air and ice. Sediment shifts between the granular and the formed, reimagining scales between land and matter. Sediment is multiple.

Shoreline

Unlike ‘coast’, shorelines refer to the places in which land and water meet. This ‘line’ is thick and energetic, moving with tides, erosion, currents, and weather.

Writing

Writing is the inscription of language, and the practice of such inscription. This can take the shape of words on paper or linguistic communions of matter. Writing assembles and communicates relations. Writing is written in arrangements of power. Writing plays with encounters between narrative and text, between image and earth, between temporal marks and flickers of energy.