About the Work: 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.

About the Artist: Victoria Bradford Styrbicki is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and founder of A House Unbuilt, whose work bridges embodied performance, social practice, and material investigation. Rooted in long-term engagement with river systems and watershed communities, her practice draws from fieldwork, listening, and participatory frameworks to explore how human and ecological systems shape one another.
Her projects often translate lived experience into movement scores, textile-based works, and public installations that investigate communication, care, and repair beyond the limits of language. With a deep commitment to water stories, rights, and futures, she works across the Mississippi River watershed and Gulf Coast, engaging communities in processes that connect personal narrative to environmental awareness and collective action.
Through this interdisciplinary approach, Styrbicki creates spaces where bodies, materials, and landscapes become sites of transmission—holding grief, resilience, and the possibility of new ways of relating to one another and the waters that sustain us.