In 2016, Oscar Tuazon joined the water protectors at the Standing Rock encampment in North Dakota in order to take part in the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. He subsequently developed the "Water School" to educate people about water and connect them in their respective environments. In Vienna, it forms the starting point for a journey through the environmental history of the water landscapes between the Vienna Woods, the Danube, and the Pannonian Plain.

From a scientific and artistic perspective, Gertrud Haidvogl, Severin Hohensinner (both from BOKU, Vienna), and Herwig Turk (artist) will discuss the morphological changes of the Danube in relation to the Vienna urban area, as well as the various uses and conflicts surrounding the river. The fact that Vienna is the only city in the world to have protected its famous high-quality drinking water through a constitutional provision in 2001 will also be addressed.

Gertrud Haidvogl is an environmental historian and research associate at the Institute of Hydrobiology and Water Management at BOKU, Life Sciences University, Vienna. She researches environmental history and historical ecology of rivers, focusing on the Austrian Danube. She is a contributing author to the comprehensive publication "Wasser Stadt Wien: Eine Umweltgeschichte," published in 2019. 

Severin Hohensinner studied landscape planning at BOKU, Life Sciences University, Vienna. His expertise concerns the Danube and other flowing waters, historical and current fluvial morphological studies, the development of revitalization projects, as well as monitoring in the context of river restoration. He has contributed to exhibitions and is a contributor and author of the comprehensive publication "Wasser Stadt Wien: Eine Umweltgeschichte," published in 2019. 

Herwig Turk lives and works as a freelance artist in Vienna. Since 2017, the Tagliamento River in northern Italy and other river systems such as the Danube and the rivers in the Bolzano area have been the focus of his artistic research, for which he regularly collaborates with a range of artists, scientists, and environmental organizations. Central themes include landscapes as anthropocentric laboratories and exemplary ecological frameworks marked by conflicts between economy, technology, and culture. Turk employs the term "gap space" to denote both the distances between these various systems of knowledge and to describe a field of actors who largely remain invisible in the formulation of these conflicts.