Making Kin with Our Watery Underlands
Maui Druez takes us beneath the surface — into the watery underlands of the city, where rivers, memories, and ghosts linger. Drawing on ecofeminism, Indigenous water teachings, and the writings of Donna Haraway, she invites us to imagine kinship with what leaks, seeps, and refuses control.
Is there a chance to make kin with the wetlands and collectively imagine how the watery underlands of the city and its inhabitants, human and non-human can flourish?
Human bodies do not end at the skin, as the American scholar Donna Haraway reminds us—they ripple outward, folding into the world around them, reflecting and refracting the environment in which they move. A pioneering feminist thinker and biologist, Haraway’s work traces the delicate threads of connection that bind humans to other species, unraveling the myth of the human as separate, bounded, and self-contained. For her, kinship stretches beyond bloodlines and fixed ties—it is a practice of weaving relationships across species and worlds. To “make kin” is to enter into a slow, ongoing dance of care and responsibility, a shared attunement to one another’s vulnerabilities and rhythms, where identity dissolves into interdependence and connection blooms in the spaces between.
Between the living and the spectral, between reality and the supernatural, between the seeing and the unseen, between past and future; we float in amniotic fluid, drainage tunnels, fall into sinkholes, dream of swampy ghosts, get lost in geological time, hold our breath in flooded basements, watch with watery eyes, drink polluted water and listen to the rippling vibrations of the watery underlands.
“To make kin with the watery underlands is to make kin with the forgotten, the submerged, and the repressed—not just in the geological sense, but in the cultural and ethical sense too.”
To make kin with the watery underlands is to make kin with the forgotten, the submerged, and the repressed—not just in the geological sense, but in the cultural and ethical sense too. It demands that we unsettle our ontologies of selfhood, cleanliness, and progress. It requires a shift from dominion to relationality, from control to coexistence, and from seeing the urban environment as static infrastructure to acknowledging it as a fluid and porous ecology of interdependence.
For many Indigenous communities around the world, to harm water is to disrupt a web of responsibilities—not just ecological, but ancestral and spiritual. Scholars and activists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Deborah McGregor have spoken of water as a relative, a carrier of knowledge, an active participant in ethical relations. In Anishinaabe teachings, nibi (water) is understood as a living being with memory and agency. This way of knowing dissolves the Western boundaries between human and non-human, culture and nature, body and world. It honours water’s vitality not as symbol, but as presence—at once material, spiritual, and alive in relation.
Ecofeminism likewise calls us to reconsider the way water has been gendered—often feminized, as in the figure of the river as a nurturing mother or a wild, untameable woman: flowing, fertile, and feared when out of control. Across many cultures and languages, rivers, lakes, and oceans are personified as feminine - bearing qualities historically associated with women under patriarchal systems: care, intuition, cyclical rhythms, but also volatility and excess. This symbolic alignment has justified both romanticisation and control, positioning water as something to be managed, subdued or feared when it breaches its boundaries.
Making kin with watery underlands therefore becomes a political act: one that seeks to repair our fractured relationship with what is deemed feminine, fluid, irrational, or uncontrollable.
The wet beneath the surface
In Brussels, the underlands are not only metaphor for what is hidden or forgotten—they are material. De Zenne, a river once central to the city’s life, now flows mostly underground, hidden beneath streets and squares. Once considered unruly, polluted, and inconvenient, the river was buried—subsumed into the infrastructural logic of a city that wanted to forget its messier, wetter parts. But water does not forget. It traces paths in silence. It returns through rising groundwater, flash floods, damp corners, and mouldy ceilings.
The city is saturated with ghosts—of the river, of the land it once fed. There, below the surface, is the slow memory of floodplains and spongy soils. Of fish migrations that once passed through the city. Of washing lines strung over riverbanks, of a city that once lived with its river instead of against it. These memories are not lost—they seep, they linger, they surface in unexpected ways. In the curve of a street that once mirrored the river’s bend. In a persistent dampness in a cellar. In the names of neighbourhoods—like Maalbeek or Neerpedebeek (Mill Brook or Neerpede Brook)—that still echo their watery roots.
But the underground does not only hold the past. It also holds the future. A future shaped by rising waters, shifting climates, and the slow failure of impermeable design. The waters are coming back—not as punishment, but as a reminder that the logic of separation cannot hold. That the built city must begin to accommodate what it once tried to bury.
Just outside the city, along the Zennevallei, traces of this alternative geography surface. Here, the Zenne flows unbound, less disciplined by concrete and more by terrain. Places like le Marais Wiels and Neerpede interrupt the urban grid with their own rhythms. In these in-between spaces, water lingers, slows, spreads. It forms puddles, marshes, temporary lakes. It invites birds, frogs, reeds—and us, if we’re willing to pause.
“The damaged landscape is not a failure to be erased but a site of vulnerability and repair, offering the conditions for genuine coexistence and kinship to emerge.”
These are not untouched places. They are sites of entanglement: shaped by farming and runoff, restoration projects and failed developments, dog walkers and dragonflies. But they offer something rare—conditions for kinship. Not the tidy kinship of curated nature, but one forged in messiness. In coexistence rather than control. They remind us that kinship must be made in the damaged, not the pristine –because it is in these messy, imperfect places where resilience takes root, where life persists through adaptation, and where human and non-human histories rub up against each other like sediment in a slow current. The damaged landscape is not a failure to be erased but a site of vulnerability and repair, offering the conditions for genuine coexistence and kinship to emerge. In places where the city leaks, and something unexpected grows in the cracks.
Kinship is a slow practice. It’s about getting muddy. About sitting with discomfort. Once, in the marsh at le Marais Wiels, I stood still long enough for the frogs to return. I watched them emerge, patient and bright-eyed. I thought: maybe kinship starts here—in stillness, in watching, in being willing to be watched back.
“To make kin with the watery underlands is not to idealise the river or the marsh. It is to accept that we are always in relation—with the mildew, with the mould, with the sewer rats and the duckweed and the slick algae growing on forgotten stones. ”
To make kin with these watery underlands is to reimagine our relationship to the city itself—not as a sealed-off human domain, but as a porous assemblage of bodies, flows, histories, and futures. A city of leaks, sponges, thresholds. A city shaped as much by what lies beneath as by what is built above. It means letting go of the urge to idealise the river or the marsh, and instead embracing the messy, ongoing relations—with the mildew, the mould, the sewer rats, the duckweed, and the slick algae growing on forgotten stones.
We cry, soak in bathtubs, we drink from communal taps. We are not separate from the puddle on the floor, from the sewer beneath our feet. To flood is to remember. When we flush, we are participating in a choreography of circulation. There is hope in this fluidity. Not the hope of a utopia, but the hope of repair. To make kin with watery underlands is to cultivate a different imagination—one that values slowness, receptivity, and reciprocity. It is to imagine cities not as dry zones of mastery, but as living wetlands, full of ghosts, stories, leaks, and life.
We must learn to speak water’s language—not just in policy or art, but in gesture, in ritual, in design, in breath. In the way we build homes that absorb rather than repel, in gardens that collect rain instead of draining it away. In the rituals of slow walking along marshy paths, listening to the suck and squelch beneath our feet. In urban spaces designed like wetlands—soft, spongy, and receptive. In the act of leaving space for overflow, for seepage, for stillness. In learning to sit with dampness rather than erase it, to honour puddles, to watch algae spread and not flinch. It means practicing attention in a world that rewards forgetting. Kinship here is not a promise of harmony, but a practice of recognition. It is to live as though the underlands remember us—and to answer that memory with care. These are small gestures, yes—but they are how we begin to relearn the ethics of saturation.
We are already kin. The only question is: what kind of kin will we be?
Maui Druez is a Brussels-based independent filmmaker and visual anthropologist whose work explores themes of interconnectedness, coexistence, and relationships with landscapes, waters, and ecologies through environmental storytelling and (eco)feminist thinking. She is currently working on a feature documentary set in central Portugal that traces eucalyptus monoculture, forest fires, and multispecies entanglement to question extractive notions of progress. Born in a seaside town, her deep bond with the ocean continues to shape a practice rooted in listening, reciprocity, and relational ways of being.