EMOTIONS ARE OCEANS
8 May - 26 June 2022
Ursula Biemann
Carolina Caycedo
Marjolijn Dijkman & Toril Johannessen
Xandra van der Eijk
Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman
Sami Hammana
Lukas Marxt
Josèfa Ntjam
Alice dos Reis
Himali Singh Soin
Riikka Tauriainen & Paloma Ayala & Anne-Laure Franchette
Susanne M. Winterling / The Kalpana
Müge Yilmaz
Delft
The Netherlands
Bodies of water—such as seas, oceans, lakes, and glaciers—harbour invisible yet crucial organisms that allow for survival on Earth, and they are increasingly subject to imbalances and undesired stagnancy. For instance, the release of freshwater from melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland increase acidity, alter saline levels, and negatively influence oceanic currents, all of which is destructing to microorganisms responsible for fifty to eighty-five per cent of the world’s oxygen production and CO2 storage. The ever-so-rapid pace in which technology is advanced impacts water ecosystems too. A new smartphone announcement implies that damage to the sea soil has been made, as an ever-increasing demand for minerals such as cobalt, copper, or manganese to produce high-tech applications—including wind turbines and solar panels as well—requires deep sea mining. This practice originates disturbances on the seafloor that leads to loss of endemic species, sediment plumes that smother animals, sound and light pollution, and potential leaks and spills of fuel and other toxic products.
When we reflect on the subject water, we inevitably reflect on ourselves, and ourselves in connection to many others that dwell on Earth. From oceans, seas, rivers, and lakes, to rainclouds, filtration tanks, fish, and humans: these are all interconnected bodies of water. Watery embodiment is always constituted by a hybrid assemblage. That is, a grouping of human, animal, vegetable, bacterial, and other planetary bodies coursing through one another. It also challenges our canonical definitions and cartographies of space, time, and species, and calls attention to the fact that as bodies of water we are both different and in common. All the same, an advocacy for common grounds as watery bodies ought to be nuanced: even though "we" are implicated in grappling with the ecological deterioration, "we" are not all the same, nor are we "in it" in the same way.
As professor Astrida Neimanis phrases it, “water is an archive of meaning and matter”. What we were and what we will become are concurrently returned and projected to and from us in an interdependent ebb and flow, in a simultaneous acknowledgement that a rich alterity of water bodies flows through us in an ongoing cycle. The first act of Underland merges the circular spaces of RADIUS, once a body of water itself, in artistic proposals for ways of existentially flowing in a jeopardised landscape of abundance and scarcity, of financial speculation and risk, of emergence and devastation. Reckoning ourselves as bodies of water underlines a rich set of assemblages that demand compromised responses at the present time. In what ways can we establish sustainable blueprints for equitable water cycles? How can thinking about ourselves as watery bodies in connection to other species entangle us in productive ways? How can we move away from anthropocentric water sovereignty by embracing an inter-species consciousness, and what systems of distribution and relating may emerge from it?