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

Slowfloat Audio Experience

Presented on Lake Ohrid as a part of PROSPER AiR, a collaboration between LOOP (GR), Eho Animato (Serbia), Peripetjia and LDA Struga (North Macedonia), and Oyoun (Germany)

# 2-Channel Binaural Audio Stream for Synchronized Mobile Phones w. Headphones, 25.00min

Underwater Cosmologies - People of Eels uses the migratory cycle of the Ohrid eel to focus on Lake Ohrid’s environmental landscape and challenges, as well as the historical narratives of the region. By investigating the lake as a deep archive we want to examine water’s fluid heritage as a place of geo-cultural and human-nonhuman memory. 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 globe. By narrating the story from the perspective of an eel, we try to challenge hegemonic and violent forms of subjectivation that have produced this anthropocentric moment.