Anadromous Architectures: Winter 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. Winter-Run follows a migration route up the Sacramento River as well as along two Sacramento tributaries (the McCloud River and Battle Creek) that are now being readied for salmon reintroduction.