Spearheaded by Victoria Bradford Styrbicki with interactive development by Studio Meta, an award-winning digital agency out of Paris, France and editorial support from Natalie Warren, author of Hudson Bay Bound, Relay of Voices embarks on a mission to share and connect individual stories from across the Mississippi River region. Relay of Voices is grounded in an impassioned journey taken by Victoria and her husband Tom in 2019, traversing the entire length of the River at the pedestrian scale, listening deeply with no agenda, seeking to understand why people make a home in this region of the country so often prey to declining populations, poverty, environmental concerns, and natural disasters. How has the story of the watershed of the Mississippi River connected and shaped these communities for centuries into the present?

Relay of Voices captures stories from 104 communities, 20 – 40 miles apart, through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, finishing at the Mouth of the River at the Gulf of Mexico. While each community was identified and vetted into an organized route to provide accurate representation of both the River and diversity of the communities surrounding, it is the individual voices that truly shape the narrative and build connections across geographic boundaries. These individuals come from the dichotomy of rural and urban communities found along the River, with many of them still making a living off the water and land. The River is home to a collection of small towns ranging between 200 and 60,000 in population anchored by 7 cities with populations over 100,000, serving as beacons of culture and urbanity along the waterway.

Relay of Voices partnered with the Water Institute of the Gulf to gather interview and geographic data from fieldwork which reveals the overwhelming need to understand how the “One River” affects the outcomes at its terminal. The Water Institute of the Gulf’s Senior Research Scientist and Social Geographer, Scott Hemmerling, helped to shape the questions the Styrbicki’s asked in interviews with local residents along the original journey as well as provide GPS body cameras for the researchers to geolocate the information they gathered. This data was then shared with the Institute for their use and processed by Styrbicki to create the narratives, footage, and performances found on Relay of Voices (relayofvoices.com).

“I think that for most of my adult life I’ve been studying my history because I didn’t get it in high school. Nobody tells you about anything, so I’ve been educating myself about, ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where did I come from?’ “Why am I here?’”

— Sally Fineday, Day 4: One Who Crosses Over

The stories also contain original audio and video footage from the field, photographs, and “Niimikaage”—movement-based retellings of feature stories. These “Niimikaage” include a collage of original footage, staged retelling, and generative movement and are meant to address loss and creation of meaning in storytelling. By using movement to emphasize and expand the story like music in a film, Styrbicki is extracting a deeper story than is available on the surface, tapping into the movement vocabulary as well as the spoken vocabulary of the subject. Each piece is entitled “Niimikaage” after the Ojibwe word meaning “she dances for people/for a purpose” out of reverence for the tribal lands traversed while gathering these stories and to emphasize that there is a creative power in putting someone else’s story into another body.