waterybeings’ playful research practice engaged field-work and site-specific research, fictioning and world-creation, re-enactment, and identifying tentatively potential ruptures. We understood knowledge as an active agent that manifests different affects in the world. Water therein acted as a transformative force for our fictioning-practice. Learning-doing-responding on different scales was the key to our attitude and allowed for telling stories that foster attentive noticing and reflection in relation to local realities.

waterybeings have looked into practices and histories of humans ‘taming’ bodies of water, as exemplified through reflecting on the history of Rotterdam’s port, and the way people there shape the land according to their desires. Just as rivers meander and the sea rises and falls, the bodies of water in us wax and wane according to its environment. Through projects such as The Water that Moves You (2023), a sound-walk that unites the history and site-specificity with the fictions of the waterfront of the river Maas in Rotterdam, we experimented with ways of activating shared imaginations, knowledge, and relating-in-body and acting-in-relation.

In this group-exhibition photographs that I took during waterybeings' field-trips in Romania were on display. In July 2024, waterybeings spent two weeks at the Watermelon Residency in Bechet (RO).

In this group-exhibition the riso-printed waterybeings booklet The Water that Moves You and two prints (riso and cyano) of the booklet's developing process were shown. Additionally, an experimental Cyano-print of mine was on display.

^{This part of The Water that Moves You was funded by Rotterdam Municipality.}

The stories we tell mark our understanding of the world, frame our experience and guide our interaction with the environment. Watermelons rose into the world as life-giving reservoirs in dry land. Once a symbol for rescuing/sustenance, now a global commodity sustained by vast agricultural technologies and logistic infrastructures. As production is scaled up, for all to be able to enjoy a juicy slice on hot summer days, water consumption becomes reckless. How does the fact that watermelons can grow in sandy soil stand up to the reality of desertification, and other aspects of daily life and customs in and around Bechet?

waterybeings see their research as a direct engagement through fictioning. By simultaneously opening up the past through fiction/historical reading-construction, and dissecting the highly rationalised irrigation farming systems we aim to imagine life-sustaining practices otherwise. Taking the watermelon as a body that is filled/made with endocrine agents, like ours, that regulate and disrupt pre-determined bodily processes, we will re-situate the body-in-the-making within its networks of co-existence:

1. The potential of understanding Watermelon universally as a species with a Latin name (Citrullus lanatus) beyond the domain of biological-scientific knowledge;
2. The kind of watermelon that is specific to the different fields in Bechet, that perhaps bears a different name in each farmers’ practice, and its life-support in the local soil-water-farmer entanglement;
3. Watermelon as a symbol existing in the stories in Bechet of specific individual-generational-geopolitical context;
4. Watermelon as a gestational metaphor in a juicy, hormonal, libido-structuring media-endocrine-chemical environment. Is watermelon seen as a sexy fruit in Bechet?

These elements operate on different scales and across different (in-)tangible/visceral domains. Bringing these elements together through fictioning allows us to move beyond the limit of and divide between objective analysis and traditional folklore/praxis. To keep the water flowing, it needs to be allowed to re-enter the larger nourishing endocrine system of land-human-fruit circulation.

During the two weeks in Bechet, Romania, we were curious to encounter, confront and perform local tales, customs and symbolism around watermelons together with the locals. Our playful approach valued every affiliation in locally shared tacit knowledge and habits since they all have important lessons to teach. This very site-specific research assisted us to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which different people interact with their environment, and physically and mentally disassociate from the consequences - willingly and/or forcefully. Together we made space for nourishing reciprocated co-existence through fictioning and thus questioning and adapting the ways we go about things.

The residency was part of Flowing Streams and supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Romania. Flowing Streams is a multi-residency project curated by Adelina Luft, that takes place in rural areas of Romania and explores local approaches to the cultural ecology of water, designed and developed by EUNIC Romania involving 8 cultural institutions operating in Romania.

Flowing Streams concluded with an online artist talk, Flowing Streams: Meet the Artists, with all the participating artists and a publication to which everyone contributed.

waterybeings’ invited the audience on a walk that delves into the veins of The Hague's water-management history and their urban contexts in which visible and invisible water-bodies can be met.

Together with the audience waterybeings walked through The Hague's city centre while taking water as verbs. Celebrate its multiplicities and ambiguities by opening themselves to resonate with the buidlings, walkways, bricks, stories, boundaries, anecdotes, and their watery leakages.

The Water that Moves You is a sound-walk designed for a specific section along the river Maas in the city centre of Rotterdam. The audio includes parallel narratives of different characters that blend the past, present, and future together. They speculate on our watery destiny from the specific angles of the Maas as a trade carrier, a public space, a potential threat as the water levels are rising and a place for contemplation.

link to the sound-walk: The Water that Moves You (2023)

link to the trial version of the sound-walk: The Water that Moves You (2022, trial)

CREDITS:

A warm thank you to everyone who made this project and the accompanying booklet possible.

Sound artist: Joshua Thies; Sound Studio: iii; Voice actors: Thom Driver, Guy Livingston, Wilhelmina Sederholm, June Yu; Print workshop: Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag, Stencilwerck

This project is funded by Gemeente Rotterdam.

The Water that Moves You booklet is a poetic continuation of the sound-walk it accompanies. It holds imagery that adds to the speculative storyline and offers an entrance to revisit the possibilities that living and moving with water holds.

The booklet is riso-printed and hand-folded by waterybeings at the Grafische Werkplaats in the Hague. Conceptual layers of the research that informed the sound-walk form the different layers, such as photographs from field-research, experiments with cyano-printing and the continuously changing paths of a river if left to its own course of being.

Release date: September 17th, 2023
Page count: 6 pages
Format: accordion fold A3 poster zine
Selling price: 12,50 €
Language: English