Fluid Relations for Endurance video and sound piece in The Wave at Collecteurs digital museum, June 2022
curated by Carolina Martínez & Àngels Miralda
with artsits: Hokusai· Ohan Breiding · John Akomfrah ·Enrique Ramírez · Pınar Öğrenci · María Dalberg · Ieva Epnere ·David Horvitz · Enric Farrés Duran · Mounir Gouri · Bertille Bak· Elizabeth Gallón Droste & Daniela Medina Poch · Rosana Antolí · Julian Charrière · Thomas Ruff · Adrian Paci · Marie Farrington · Ben Russell · Karel Koplimets · Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman · Harun Morrison · Patricia Domínguez · Ursula Biemann · Beatrice Alvestad Lopez · Nona Inescu · Paige Emery · Chen Wei · Emilija Škarnulyte · Panos Aprahamian · Letícia Ramos · Su Yu Hsin
Fluid Relations for Endurance explores the ritualistic connections to water as a form of renewing intersubjective endurance.
Throughout the larger project of shifting away from ingrained norms of capitalist individualism towards interdependence and its pertaining repercussions and responsibilities, a prevalent pathway towards such shift is that of world-building, reimagining new narratives, and poetics for engineering new realities. To materialize the modalities of meaning-making, we must locate the places where they convene with praxis, and how to orient ourselves in those locations towards ecosocial renewal. Ritual is situated in the meeting place between poetics and praxis, establishing catalytic channels through a cartography of the ecological body. This meeting place brings awareness to the relations that weave the infrastructure of worldmaking, which require ethical nuances of how entities are related within complexities. A body as an extension among entangled bodies must still acknowledge alterities and injustices. Shifting towards planetary perspectives beyond us cannot negate the reciprocal commitments for being /becoming humans as praxis.
In this ritual, water is looked at as the bridge to the unconscious mind with the dissolving of individual subjectivity, a metaphor long used throughout different areas of mysticism, psychoanalysis, and alchemy. Relating and reconnecting to water is embodying its intersubjective malleability and porosity which has shaped the way for endurance. While continually self-folding, water churns into its future its past, exemplifying a ritual of endurance. Philosopher Catherine Malabou relates Deleuze's concept of the fold, the perpetuating state always already opening to the future, to habit and plasticity due to its repeated change. Habit creates union between the psychic and physical which allows change to happen as new pathways are opened in the nervous circuits and in the physical world. All the more powerful through the conduit of ritual, ritual creates the consciousness of change. Water holds a memory, molded through its interactions, the memory of shapeshifting over millions of years, holding compositions due to anthropogenic permeations. The water on earth today is the same water that has been immanent on the planet for millions of years, apart from a small amount shared from outer space. Water holds an ancestral endurance through connecting and folding with living bodies.
Fluid Relations for Endurance exhibits one such ritual connecting two lakes - one full of water and one which used to be full of water and now only now the memory of water evaporated that used to inhabit it. The latter lake is in California, home to increasing droughts and water scarcity alongside increasing water privatization as a consequence of another meaning-making ritual which is the financial market. The market is a place where ritual is powerful in its effects, transforming value into reality via commodified entities such as water. The same technology can be used for benevolence with the proper ethics of entanglement and politics of being human as praxis. Enjoying the wealthiest economy in the country, the majority of Californians haven’t faced the reality of drought, living in the comfort of water outsourced from other states which might very soon run out. Bodies of water are moving quickly and the new ecologies of our planet brought on by the effects of the Anthropocene require new responses. We need forms of collective care to dress the locations of loss and grief. We can create rituals to bring new memories of water in place, to reorient ourselves as human with landscape, where we can alter habits in our unconscious minds to propel catalysts of care to ripple out into the physical worlds.
Thinking about relations as the praxis where ritual is never completed with an end goal, transform this ancient human technology into a continual catalyst for renewal. Ritual is the spatiotemporal topography of endurance while everything else is fleeting. As we help the planetary withstand the anthropogenic effects, we also need to find practices of enduring amidst the traumas and hardships within our own bodies. The hyper-presence learned through rituals is where the individual body multiplies like bodies of water that have endured as many bodies. Only an attentive and adaptive practice of communication can produce drastic change by being the process of change itself. The folding of fluidity as the space of possibility for creating new memories also contributes to the creation of new worlds. As we are swimming upstream against capitalist sorcery, we need the fluid praxis to maintain endurance and to keep moving collectively.