100 Rivers: Signals of Repair

100 Rivers: Signals of Repair is a month-long public art project unfolding across Dubuque, Iowa, as part of a Mississippi River–wide initiative inviting communities to reflect on their relationship to water. Installed across parks, Main Street, and cultural sites, the project places pairs of signal flags in 50 locations, forming a distributed network of communication that moves between body, landscape, and collective experience.

Each signal begins with a question shared with the public: How do we listen to the water within us? What is she saying to you today? Responses are gathered through handwritten postcards and translated into a localized signaling system adapted from the International Code of Signals. These coded phrases—rooted in lived experience—are installed throughout the city, where visitors are invited to raise the flags and participate in their transmission.

At its core, the project emerges from a recognition that language is not always sufficient for what we are carrying. We rely on words to name, organize, and make meaning—but experiences of grief, environmental change, and collective uncertainty often exceed what language can hold. Water itself resists fixed definition: it shifts, erodes, floods, disappears, and returns. In this context, communication must also become more fluid—less about explanation, and more about attention, relation, and response.

Drawing on maritime signaling systems designed to convey urgency across distance, 100 Rivers reimagines communication as an embodied and relational practice. The signals do not translate directly; instead, they hold conditions—rest, instability, reorientation—that move through both human and ecological systems.

The project culminates in a public performance during the Dubuque Farmers Market, where trained community participants embody selected signals through choreographed movement. In this way, meaning is not spoken but carried—moving from person to person, site to site—inviting a deeper form of listening that may shape how we move forward together along the river.

Date

June 5-28, 2026 (Installation); June 27 (Performance Activation)

Place

Climate Rendezvous, Dubuque, IA

Lead Artist

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki

Choreography

Brenna Mosser, Victoria Bradford Styrbicki

Crochet

Lauren Moore, Jeri Grotberg, Katie Kelsey, Jessica McMahon