Over on the Dangerous Minds website, there is some news about a future project for the Trinity River. Next year, the artists Brian Howe and Freya Bardell will install a “River Liver,” a project concept originally created in 2005 for the Los Angeles River that seeks “to raise awareness of awareness of the many ecological and cultural conditions that line its concrete banks.” Since then, the “River Liver” has become an annual project in Los Angeles, way of addressing the environmental health of that city’s forgotten waterway through art.

Here’s Freya Bardell on a Dallas iteration planned for 2012:

As I keep mentioning our work is site specific . . . Coming up in Dallas, there will be something totally different. We’re anxious to delve into the site history and see what emerges. Maybe we could create more of an atoll or invite people to inhabit one of the islands. We have to get there first and see.

This is a very positive development for the Trinity and, frankly, something I’ve been thinking about for sometime. While the Trinity River Project flounders in decades of political and financial muck, we often forget about an aspect of the project that even the planned amenities – if they ever come to fruition – won’t solve in and of themselves: how do we create life in the Trinity flood plain? One solution may lay in rethinking the plain not as merely a park, per se, but also as a setting for a series of installations that can call attention to the Trinity and energize and organize life in and around it. This project represents a positive step in that direction, and it will be interesting to see how Howe and Bardell tackle the massive scale and the no man’s land nature of the untamed Trinity.

Photo: Howe and Bardell’s “Migration of the Marine Tumbleweed” in Santa Monica bay. (via Dangerous Minds).