THE NEW LIQUIDITY

Underwater
Cosmologies

Underwater Cosmologies is an ongoing umbrella project created directly in response to the climate crisis, in which we use participatory soundwalks, audio guides and installations, to provoke critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the future of freshwater and marine ecosystems. By investigating different bodies of water and treating them as deep archives, we want to examine water’s fluid heritage as a place of geo-cultural and human-non-human memory. The project intertwines research from several fields of study: sound and media art, art in public space, the field of locative media and technology, the field of sensory studies and emotional geographies and finally, the field of environmental and sustainability studies.

In ”Water And Dreams” Gaston Bachelard writes that ”water truly is the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.” Alas, water is the connecting element, the most transitional element as it can exist in solid, fluid and gaseous form. In a time of climate and ecological emergency we keep this project open in terms of practice in order to better be able to react and resonate with the site in question to foster a critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the current status and future of the marine ecosystems at a perilous moment in time. We want to examine water’s fluid ontology and the forms of life it enables, specifically, position water as shared human-non-human heritage and a site of geo-cultural memory, while recognizing that water always comes to us mediated. With this, we adopt the critical apparatus of media theory to think about geology, heritage, history and memory in terms of dynamic processes rather than solid objects. Furthermore, we would like to move beyond the perception of water in its oceanic arrangements only in terms of “fluidity” and to see it also as “a social space”, encapsulating a complex power relations. We would like to address hydromedia as a conceptual tool that will allow us to view cultural practices constitutively entangled with their environments, outlining more fluid post-Anthropocene ethics.

Our research focuses on the awareness of marine worldviews and a deeper understanding of the changes in marine ecosystems management as well as water politics in general. By focusing on story-telling as a method to trace the archives of underwater memory and its corporality we want to ask how we can engage with liquid violence, hydropoetics of displacement, and inland water's forensics. What can we learn about our corporeality from the underwater cosmologies and how can we formulate new ways of fluidity?

Underwater Cosmologies: (more info)

People of Eels - Ancestors of the Future

Audio-visual work

Showcased at Luminafest Light and Video Art Festival, Amberg/Weiden, Germany 2024

# 1 or 4-Channel Video Stream
Surround Sound

The Vimeo clip is of the 1-channel version, retaining some of the split screen aesthetic.

For the light, video art and projection mapping festival Luminafest in Amberg / Weiden The New Liquidity showcased a work-in-progress segment from their upcoming video work People of Eels - Ancestors of the Future. The piece was originally premiered as a slowfloat - a site-specific audio guide for floating on Lake Ohrid in spring of 2024, before being developed into a larger multichannel audio-visual work based on their conducted research during the artists’ residency at PROSPER AiR in Ohrid (North Macedonia).

People of Eels - Ancestors of the Future uses the migratory cycle and existential predicament of the eel to delve into how human interference disrupts ecosystems and habitats across the globe. The violence of coastal industries, artificial means of water regulation and building of hydroelectric plants have interrupted the natural life cycle of the eel, blocking the previously free waterways between their origins in the Sargasso Sea and the various freshwater systems eels inhabit across the continents. By narrating the story from the perspective of an eel, the artists try to challenge hegemonic and violent forms of subjectivation which have produced this anthropocentric moment.