This screening of the gorgeous, award-winning film, Océans, is a follow-up to the fascinating March talk at Proteus with Jesse Ausubel, creator of the Census of Marine Life. Océans is a 2009 French nature documentary directed, produced, co-written, and narrated by Jacques Perrin, with Jacques Cluzaud as co-director. Filmed throughout the globe, the documentary is an ecological drama, part thriller, part meditation on the vanishing wonders of the sub-aquatic world.

Océans features spectacular never-before-seen imagery captured by the latest underwater technologies, offering an unprecedented look beneath the sea. We are screening the French version. What little narration there is will be translated for us by our friend, Eymund Diegel.

Lost Rivers is a documentary film by Caroline Baclé retracing lost urban rivers in cities around the world. In the 19^th century, these waterways had grown so polluted, they were hidden underground in sewers to protect the population from diseases like cholera. Now visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world are seeking to release these rivers from their captivity and ‘daylight’ them above ground.

Gowanus Creek, now better known as the Gowanus Canal, was our own Lost River. After the movie, Eymund Diegel will show some historic maps and answer questions about neighborhood buried stream research.

He has been using “digital dowsing” to find the Gowanus Ghost Streams and a crack team of CSI (Creek Scene Investigation) child detectives to uncover the mystery of why your basement floods.

Eymund Diegel is an urban planner and hydrologist, also known as the Old Man of the Gowanus, due to his years of exploration and research along the banks of the canal. He is a major curatorial contributor to Proteus Gowanus’ Hall of Gowanus. 

CSI checking for sounds of imprisoned Vechtes Brook through sewer grate at 2nd St and PPW.

Please join us for opening reception of Battle Ground, the third and last exhibit of our yearlong Battle theme. Battle Ground will explore the pathos of the Battle of Brooklyn, stimulating our collective memory, evoking parallels between past and present, while focusing on the complexity, moral ambiguity, and devastation of this important Revolutionary confrontation. Historical imagery, rendered meaningless by over-use and political manipulation, will be revived in new forms.

The word “revolution” circles around us, forming the early consciousness of our country. History, also cyclical, repeats itself, and when it is forgotten, it haunts us, lying dormant in our collective memories. In 1776 one such haunting unfolded across a wide swath of what is now Brooklyn. Perhaps the battle is often forgotten (relative to others) because it was, in the words of Walt Whitman, a “resolute defeat.”

The battle-haunting still rages around us at Proteus Gowanus. Its culminating events took place just feet from our gallery location, along what was then the Gowanus Creek. The fields and marshes of 1776 are now a post-industrial urban landscape, and the Gowanus Canal is a hotly contested Federal Superfund and development site.

Maryland Willow, Robert Gould

Battle Ground is curated by Sasha Chavchavadze with help from Robert Gould, Angela Kramer and Eva Melas.

Battle Ground participants include artists, educators, urban planners and writers:

Paul Benney, Peter Bonner, Sasha Chavchavadze, Eymund Diegel, Robert Gould, Katarina Jerinic, Andrew Keating, Christina Kelly, V. Komar & A. Melamid, Angela Kramer, Robyn Love, Eva Melas, Duke Riley, Robert Sullivan.

*Special thanks to the restaurant and bakery, Runner & Stone, which takes its name from tide mills that operated along the Gowanus Creek in the 18th century.