Anadromous Architectures: Fall Run - Cynthia Hooper

Anadromous Architectures is a video and essay project that investigates the industrialized habitats of an iconic native fish in California’s Central Valley. Chinook salmon persist within the state’s vast network of dams, reservoirs, bypasses, and canals, and brave epic migrations through a nexus of cultural, technological, and epochal conflicts. Infrastructure caused the catastrophic decline of these valuable fish, yet infrastructure has also been pressed into service to rescue them from extinction. This project follows several salmon trajectories through this sprawling hydrologic mélange. The essay examines these sites from a variety of scientific and social perspectives, while the perceptually-focused nonnarrative videos invite casual discovery of these unassuming places. Fall-Run (one of three videos) follows several Central Valley Chinook salmon trajectories in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and alongside the American, Feather, and Sacramento rivers.