‘Muddy waters’ refers to water in crisis due to scarcity,
pollution, uneven geographic and social distribution and the looming hydrological disasters of climate change. The pristine
abstracted essential nature of water, is now challenged by the ecological, cultural, and political dimensions of water (Linton
2010). In the seminar we investigated urban waterways, trying to identify ‘assemblages’ of multispecies ‘world-making projects’
in ‘disturbance based ecologies’ (Tsing 2015). Tracing these dynamics in our local surrounding should help us in ‘reimagining
water’ and what it means to be part of an ‘embodied hydrocommons’ (Neimanis 2019). We went on walks, gathered materials and
observations and reassembled them together.
Bibliography:Linton, Jamie. 2010. What
Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction, Nature, History, Society (Vancouver: UBC Press)
Neimanis, Astrida. 2019.
Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic)
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom
at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Artscience
practises is a seminar by Brishty Alam & Valerie Deifel.
For more information on Kunstverein PSK please contact
brishty.alam@uni-ak.ac.at
