ABSTRACT
The sewer system is a form of more-than-human architecture. How are the sewer's designed intentions enabled and transgressed by people, water, and fish? As colonial infrastructure, the sewer is a form of embedded amnesia, obscuring the waste flows of everyday urban life. If water bodies are reservoirs of memory, the sewer is an “unreliable archive” (Neimanis 2017). This amnesia is connected to the “colonial unknowing” (Vimalassery et al. 2016) that certain forms of mastery produce by excluding indigenous histories and presents. How do we counteract these forgotten stories without re-inscribing universalizing myths of harmonious reconnection? Instead of illuminating new knowledge forms as antidote, we must learn to wade into affective uncertainty. I consider this dynamic through the humans and eels in the sewers and streams of Troy, NY.
