The Flood Necklace by Anne-Laure Freant

The Flood necklace is a data sculpture made of ceramics, with clay from the Loire River valley. It embeds the water heights of all registered floods in the city of Orléans (France) since 1800. This data sculpture is a form of tactile and sensible counter-mapping that involves a slow-making process and another kind of relationship to the data and the river it concerns. Sculpting environmental data is a proposition to map geographical entities that go around the “from above” and “far away” traditional views to open new ways of re-embedding time and materiality into cartographies. The history of floods is a precious knowledge that needs to be preserved and transmitted, especially as climate change challenges the way we inhabit and deal with our river's water height fluctuations.