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Lyn Margulis van Antropoceen naar Symbioceen

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Journalistiek programma dat zijn verhalen zoekt op plekken waar ideeën worden ontwikkeld, getest en bekritiseerd. Via niet voor de hand liggende, controversiële en tegelijkertijd gedegen analyses geeft het zijn kijk op (inter)nationale ontwikkelingen die onze wereld in de 21ste eeuw vormgeven.

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Thijs Lijster - Waterige verhalen voor het antropoceen

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Thijs Lijster - Waterige verhalen voor het antropoceen

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Rekto_Verso _ Waterige verhalen voor het antropoceen

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Waarom lezen?

Goede uiteenzetting van wat het antropoceen is. Voor wie na de tegenlichtaflevering nog verdieping zoekt.

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We recently received issues one and two of new Dutch magazine Pleasant Place and I was immediately smitten. Although small, it's a beautiful example of editorial creativity and makes a perfect Magazine of the Month as the very slightest signs of Spring emerge.

The magazine sums itself up neatly on the back cover: 'A growing collection of publications about the art of gardening'. Each issue is dedicated to a single gardening topic, and is bound using loop staples to allow the series to be collected in a binder. Note that 'growing' pun-there is a satisfying synergy here between the making of the magazine and the gradual development of a garden.

The first two issues were launched at the same time to emphasise the scope of the project; issue one is themed 'Enclosures' and covers the creation of the dedicated garden space using walls, hedges and fences. A good place to start!

Issue two takes a single plant-the Nasturtium-and investigates its botanical, historical, artistic and nutritional roles. As publishers Floor, Guus and Lou-Lou explained to me, 'Each issue could be different in content depending on what the topic needs, whether it's recipes, tips 'n tricks, historical context etc'. This aligns it with other magazines that let a tight niche be the starter for a far broader series of stories (I'm thinking of fellow Dutch mag MacGuffin).

'We're always trying to find ways to look at gardening a little differently, or find people who do,' say the publishers, 'This is also why for all our imagery we work with artists, and try to depict gardens and gardening in visually exciting ways.'

This visual sense of identity is a central part of Pleasant Place. Gardening coverage can be very serious, and the subject is taken seriously here, but the team want to have fun too. 'Together with design studio Fanfare we created a playful philosophy for the design. The way that the magazine looks can grow and change, just like a garden.'

It's a playful, evolving design philosophy; each issue a different font made up of small elements is used for the cover masthead and headlines inside the issue. The familiar petal shape of the Nasturtium is used for issue two ( above), and as well as making up letters the graphic elements are scattered through the pages, like seeds ( below).

Another part of this philosophy is the use of Pantone inks to add extra colours. 'We pick a different colour for each issue. It really makes that specific colour pop off the page, but also because we use it in different ways in text and imagery, it creates surprises, even for us. Just like in a garden.'

Colour, typography, illustration and photography are all intelligently used and combined, so that no single element overwhelms another. There's a very singular graphic vision here that reflects the content in its careful balance of the serious and fun. I love the cover design, with its bold colour and image sat in a shape echoing the bowl of a letter 'P'. It's bold, but also simple and calm.

As well as the metal loops for binding, another clever tactile element is the centre spread, which is printed on a heavier stock to stiffen the whole issue. These pages are also the home of the regular 'miniatures', illustrated plants and gardening gear to be cut out and used to create your own tiny garden ( above). A different artist is invited to create this every issue. These are by Hugo Rocci.

Pleasant Place is a delightful new publication that immediately appeals. It promises to develop like the best garden, and I can see it inspiring the garden-averse to investigate the activity. 'We don't claim to know everything about gardening,' say Floor, Guus and Lou-Lou, 'but we're learning and doing at the same time, finding the right people to inform us, discovering things along the way.'

Editors-in-chief Guus Kaandorp, Floor Kortman and Lou-Lou van Staaveren
Design Miquel Hervas and César Rogers, Fanfare
pleasantplace.space

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We're smitten by Pleasant Place, a smart new magazine from Amsterdam devoted to gardening. It's a subtle piece of publishing, both serious and fun at the same time, and beautifully designed to reflect that mix. You don't have to love gardening to enjoy it, but it'll surely win over some converts to the activity.

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Opdracht omschrijving - kunst design en ecologie

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Opdracht omschrijving - kunst design en ecologie

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Opdracht omschrijving - kunst design en ecologie

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C.J. Bastmeijer - Ieder voor zich en de natuur voor ons allen

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C.J. Bastmeijer - Ieder voor zich en de natuur voor ons allen

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Waarom lezen?

Geeft een helder beeld van de verschillende relaties die de mens tot de natuur kan hebben en welke visies hier door de tijd heen dominant in zijn geweest.

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Annouk Post - Ontdekkingsreis naar een duurzame wereld

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Annouk Post - Ontdekkingsreis naar een duurzame wereld

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Ontdekkingsreis naar een duurzame wereld – ArtEZPress

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Bruno Latour states that law should not be centered around Men, but around Life. We are just one party, among all animals, plants and Things.

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In aflevering 316 van Kunst is Lang is Lou-Lou van Staaveren te gast. In de fotografische portretten die Lou-Lou van de natuur maakt, schemert altijd de menselijke hang naar ordening door.

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Laure Prouvost geeft haar universum vol vogels, keien en plasjes water gestalte in De Pont. IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS laat de bezoeker ronddolen in zalen die zijn aangetast door de klimaatramp en daaruit voortvloeiende migratiebewegingen. Maar Laure van den Hout zoomt in op een heel klein, nauwelijks te ontwaren deel van deze allesomvattende tentoonstelling.

Als ik door de door Laure Prouvost tot landschap omgevormde museumzalen van De Pont loop, valt mijn oog op een framboos. De vrucht staat op een grote kei. Links en rechts ervan wat sporen op het steen: diep rozerood, denkend aan geronnen bloed. Op de plek waar de frambozen eerder stonden.

Hoe klein de vruchten ook zijn, door hun licht driehoekige vorm en intense kleur registreer ik ze al snel op de overige keien in de ruimte, ook al zijn die best ver weg.Het is vreemd. Er is veel te zien: vogels van glas, een gespannen tentdoek dat de beleving van de ruimte verandert, tunnels van tapijt, associatieve video's, fonteinen. Maar deze frambozen ontroeren me.Een suppoost komt naar me toe. 'U mag er ook een opeten, als u wilt.'

Elke dag worden er nieuwe frambozen op de keien gelegd. Ik houd van dit soort subtiele participatie. Als ik de vrucht opeet, internaliseer ik letterlijk een deel van de tentoonstelling.

Misschien ontroert het contrast me. De harde materie van de kei versus de intens kwetsbare en zachte bolletjes waaruit een framboos bestaat. De 'droge' steen en het sappige van de vrucht, dat nota bene sporen nalaat op de kei. Maar dat is het niet. Of althans, niet alleen.

Op delen van de museumvloer is een donkere vloeistof gegoten. Daarin kleven verpakkingen, onderdelen van mobiele telefoons, boombladeren. Op een tot sculptuur omgevormde uitlaat staat in spiegelbeeld 'I am exhausted'. Prouvost speelt met taal. Dat is ook terug te zien in de titel IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS. Iets betekent meerdere dingen, klank is niet minder belangrijk dan het woordbeeld. 'This sign is ready to migrate', lees ik als ik mijn hoofd buig en door een van de stalen buizen kijk die door de ruimte lopen. 'Together we migrate', zingt een kinderkoor vanaf een groot videoscherm. 'Migrate', een woord dat ook in symbolische vorm opduikt in de tentoonstelling, bijvoorbeeld in de vele vogels.

Zaaloverzicht/room overview Laure Prouvost IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS , De Pont museum, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels), Carlier | Gebauer (Berlin and Madrid) and Lisson Gallery (London, New York and Shanghai) photo Antoine van Kaam

Zaaloverzicht/room overview Laure Prouvost IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS , De Pont museum, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels), Carlier | Gebauer (Berlin and Madrid) and Lisson Gallery (London, New York and Shanghai) photo Antoine van Kaam

In een van de ruimtes hangen restmaterialen als nieuwe hybrides van het plafond naar beneden. Pillenstrip-klimop, dopjes van pistachenootjes met kleine spiegels. Het is makkelijk om dit net als de drab op de vloer en de vele plastic resten die erin te vinden zijn te interpreteren als commentaar op onze omgang met de natuur.Toch lijkt me dat een te eenzijdige benadering van Prouvost's tentoonstelling. Veranderlijkheid, daar gaat het over, eerder dan wanhoop. Veerkracht.Daarin ligt wellicht ook de sleutel tot waarom de frambozen me

raken. Ze vertegenwoordigen vergankelijkheid én verleiding. Nu nog in topvorm - ze blozen -, morgen of anders toch zeker overmorgen vergane glorie. De verandering ligt er al in besloten.

Frambozen blijken pioniersplanten te zijn. Dat zijn soorten die meestal als eerste opkomen op opgespoten grond, drooggevallen rivieroevers of afgebrand land. Als ik google lees ik meerdere malen 'lege gebieden'. Oei, denk ik, want wanneer is iets ooit leeg? Ook hier, taal doet ertoe. Iets 'leeg' noemen kan kwalijke gevolgen hebben. Immers, iets bevond zich al lang in de bodem. En daarmee legt de soortnaam 'pioniersplant' ook iets groters bloot: oorsprong is niet altijd zichtbaar in de enge zin. Alles heeft een stam. Together we migrate.

Drinking One Another Fountain, 2022 Collection De Pont museum, Tilburg (NL) Courtesy of the artist Photo Antoine van Kaam

The Nest, 2022 Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery Photo Antoine van Kaam

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Dit artikel werd geschreven door Laure van den Hout
Voor titels, quotes en onderschriften gebruikten we in dit artikel het variabele lettertype Arizona van Dinamo

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Pioniersplanten, steenvruchten - over IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS van Laure Prouvost

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Laure Prouvost geeft haar universum vol vogels, keien en plasjes water gestalte in De Pont. IN THE MIST OF IT ALL, ABOVE FRONT TEARS laat de bezoeker ronddolen in zalen die zijn aangetast door de...

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Sarah Monks, ''Suffer a Sea-Change'_ Turner, Painting, Drowning' (The Art of the Sublime) _ Tate

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Hoofdtentoonstelling Biënnale_ kunst in tijden van nepnieuws - NRC

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Barca Nostra_ a layered and laudable work of art - Mediamatic

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Hoofdstuk 3. Romantiek - het sublieme h.d.h.j.

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Guido van der Werve. Tastbare futiliteit – De Witte Raaf

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Listasafn Íslands / National Gallery of Iceland

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Sumarnótt - Viðtal við Ragnar Kjartansson / Death is Elsewhere - Interview with Ragnar Kjartansson

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, born in London, England,1775; active in England; died in London, England, 1851

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Vesuvius in Eruption - YCBA Collections Search

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The eighteenth-century fascination with volcanoes, and Vesuvius in particular, deepened in the nineteenth century, fuelled by the eruptions of Vesuvius in 1794, 1807, 1819, and 1822. Turner was alert to both the intellectual and aesthetic possibilities that the evolving discipline of geology offered; he cultivated friendships with pioneering geologists, including John MacCulloch and Charles Stokes, and his sketchbooks contain detailed records of geological phenomena. During the second decade of the nineteenth century Turner, a keen proponent of the Sublime, had his own burst of volcanic activity. In 1815 he exhibited his canvas “The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St Vincent” (Butlin and Joll, 1984, no. 132); two years later the print publisher W. B. Cooke commissioned Turner to make companion watercolors of Vesuvius, showing the volcano in eruption and repose (Wilton, “Turner”, 1979, nos. 698–99). This watercolor, the third of the group and the most spectacular, would also have been made around the same time as Cooke’s drawings, if the inscription on the back, which is not in Turner’s hand, is correct. Turner did not visit Italy until 1819, and he may have based the Vesuvius drawings on the work of another draftsman, most likely James Hakewill, whose sketches Turner used for a group of watercolors commissioned as designs for Hakewill’s publication “Picturesque Tour of Italy”. Although the Center’s Vesuvius drawing was neither exhibited nor engraved, its extremely high degree of finish suggests that Turner had made it for a specific purpose, perhaps as a commission. Although Turner’s patron Walter Fawkes owned the watercolor, it was not included in Fawkes’s exhibition of his collection at his London house in 1819, which featured his outstanding holdings of Turner’s work. The work was probably acquired by Fawkes (and possibly even made) sometime later.

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Sarah Monks, ''Suffer a Sea-Change'_ Turner, Painting, Drowning' (The Art of the Sublime) _ Tate

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Ragnar Kjartansson’s Panorama of Love and Death

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Lood, zink, cadmium. In de bodem van creatieve broedplaats De Ceuvel in Amsterdam-Noord zitten allerlei giftige metalen - het is een voormalige scheepswerf. Ongezond en niet duurzaam, dus wil De Ceuvel ervan af.

De broedplaats maakt daarvoor gebruik van fyto-extractie. De planten die er groeien, zoals brandnetels en kleefkruid, en die ingezaaid worden, zoals wilg en raapzaad, nemen stoffen uit de bodem op terwijl ze groeien. De stoffen worden opgeslagen in de plant, die vervolgens wordt geoogst. Die cyclus wordt net zolang herhaald totdat de bodem schoon (genoeg) is.

Er is alleen één probleem. „De geoogste planten kan je niet composteren, want dan breng je die stoffen weer terug in het systeem", zegt designer Marte Mei van Haaster (32), wier atelier op een steenworp afstand ligt van De Ceuvel. „Als je ze naar de vuilstort brengt, verschuif je het probleem alleen maar."

Van Haaster had een idee. Ze wijst naar een A4'tje op een prikbord in haar atelier. Daarop staat de levensloop van de planten uitgetekend nadat ze metalen uit de bodem hebben opgenomen: oogsten, drogen, shredderen. Van de gescheurde plantenresten worden pellets gemaakt, die worden verbrand.

De as die overblijft is perfect voor keramiekglazuur. „De metalen geven het glazuur kleur", zegt ze. „Als je glazuur maakt uit een receptenboek, dan voeg je er koper of ijzer aan toe. De as was ik, zodat alle zouten eruitgaan. Dat vermeng ik met kleipoeder en smeer ik op ongebakken keramiek en bak ik in één keer helemaal af." Het eindproduct van het proces is keramische tuingereedschap voor het oogsten en zaaien van de planten bij De Ceuvel.

Het project, Polluted Plants to Pottery (2024), is tekenend voor het werk van Van Haaster. Dat maakt ze van natuurproducten, vaak reststromen, en draait om samenwerking tussen de mens en niet-mens: planten, dieren, en „alles wat een levende oorsprong heeft. Een steen bijvoorbeeld is ook ontstaan door de geologische druk van de aarde."

Van Haaster, die opgroeide in Amsterdam-Oost, was als kind het liefst buiten en ging vaak naar natuurcampings. „Klimmen in bomen, zwemmen tussen de rotsen en dingen maken met stenen, modder, klei." Haar basisschool had een grote tuin waar ze tijdens het overblijven naartoe gingen. Ze voelde zich toen al onderdeel van „een groter netwerk aan leven": „Als mijn moeder me na een bezoek aan Artis vroeg om een leeuw te tekenen, tekende ik het verblijf waar de leeuw in zat."

Na haar tienertijd, toen ze „meer geconfronteerd werd met de gevolgen van klimaatverandering en ecosysteemvernietiging", realiseerde ze dat dit voor anderen niet vanzelfsprekend was. „Dat was een moment van bewustwording; dat veel mensen zich gevoelsmatig hebben losgekoppeld van het ecologische systeem waar ze onderdeel van zijn."

Als designer probeert Van Haaster „ontwerpen te maken die de omgeving niet verder afbreken, maar een stukje gezonder achterlaten". De objecten die ze maakt moeten mensen helpen zich op een „andere manier tot de natuur te verhouden". Zoals Will Water Want (2023): een glazen sculptuur in rivier de Dommel ter hoogte van Eindhoven. Op een brug ertegenover monteerde ze luisterbuizen waardoor mensen de rivier konden horen. Zo gaf ze water „een stem".

In haar atelier - een loods die ze deelt met stylisten, architecten, fotografen, ontwerpers en filmmakers - staan overal samples van werk. Tegels van marmer, kastpoten van klei, keramische handvaten voor tuingereedschap. De kop waar Van Haaster thee uit drinkt is gemaakt van overgebleven klei, het bananenbrood waar ze zo nu en dan een hap van neemt heeft ze zelf gebakken.

Momenteel werkt ze voor „een privépersoon" aan een XL-versie van haar Companion Species Cabinet (2024): een kast van beuken- en dennenhout, keramische poten en glazuur van as van diezelfde bomensoorten. De kast ontwierp ze tijdens een zesweekse residentie bij cultureel insitituut Schloss Hollenegg in Oostenrijk. „Ik heb daar workshops gevolgd over de teloorgang van de Oostenrijkse bossen. Een kever, de hout-etende letterzetter, roeit daar bossen uit omdat het monoculturen zijn. 98 procent van het bos bestaat uit sparren, precies waar die kever van houdt. De kast die er toen uit is gekomen zegt eigenlijk: we staan in dienst van een gezond bos. Het maakt niet uit wat voor fokking hout er uit een bos komt. Wij hebben de ontwerpkracht om met ieder hout iets te maken."

Als puber was Van Haaster al bezig met kunst en ontwerp. Ze was „in awe" van vrouwelijke (textiel)kunstenaars als Sheila Hicks en Louise Bourgeois en maakte zelf kleding. Na de propedeuse wilde ze overstappen naar de Rietveld Academie. Ze was net achttien toen ze toelating deed. „Ze zeiden: daar zitten mensen van gemiddeld 23. Wat als je even een jaar gaat chillen en reizen? Dan mag je volgend jaar gegarandeerd terugkomen." Een tussenjaar dus. Maar wat te doen? Het werd modellenwerk. Op haar vijftiende was ze al op straat gescout. Ze schreef zich in bij Platform in Amsterdam, maar nam aanvankelijk geen opdrachten aan. „Ik zat gewoon op school en was er niet mee bezig." Maar al in de tram van de Rietveld naar huis belde ze haar agent. „Ik zei: 'Yo, ik heb een jaar, let's have some fun, let's see where this goes. Twee maanden later liep ik voor Prada."

Eén jaar werden er drie. „Als je het net als model begint te maken, of probeert te maken, ben je zoveel aan het investeren. Fysiek maar ook financieel. Ik woonde maanden in New York, maar verdiende geen droog brood. Op een plek waar overdag een vrouw mensen harste, sliep ik 's nachts op een luchtbed. Toen ik dat een jaar had gedaan en ik het eindelijk begon terug te verdienen, dacht ik niet: oké, ik ga terug naar de Rietveld."

A gift and a curse, zo omschrijft Van Haaster haar modellencarrière. Ze is dankbaar voor alles wat het haar heeft gebracht: vriendschappen, culturele ontwikkeling, roem, geld. „Vorig jaar stond ik op de cover van Milk Decoration, dat is als ontwerper het hoogst haalbare. Laten we eerlijk zijn, dat is alleen maar omdat ik ook model ben. Maar er zijn veel momenten geweest waarop ik dacht: was ik maar een normale meid, die gewoon student kan zijn. Als model draag je al vroeg verantwoordelijkheden van een volwassene. Ik bedoel, je vliegt op je achttiende businessclass, je leeft voor je werk." Toen ze in 2013 op de Rietveld begon, werkte ze een tijdlang alleen voor Louis Vuitton, waar ze een contract voor twee jaar had.

Max/Mei

Op de academie vormde ze met haar vriend en medestudent Max Daalhuizen een kunstduo: Max/Mei. Ze trouwden in 2016, toen ze waren afgestudeerd. „Het werk dat we maakten ging over de scheidslijn tussen wanneer iets artificieel is gemaakt en wanneer iets natuurlijk is ontstaan", zegt ze.

Hun Interdependent Tree (2018), een tijdelijke installatie voor Artis, bijvoorbeeld, bestond uit roze ballon-achtige sculpturen die rustten op houten stokken. Van Haaster: „De stokken ondersteunen de mens, is het idee. De stokken kwamen uit de verblijven van dieren, hun tandafdrukken vonden we prachtig." Het werk installeerden ze tussen de planten en bomen in de dierentuin. De stokken gingen op in de omgeving, de ballonnen vielen op en werden beïnvloed door de natuur eromheen, vooral door de wind.

In 2020 ging ze de master social design doen aan de Design Academy Eindhoven, Daalhuizen werd landschapsarchitect. Zij en Daalhuizen stopten in 2021 als kunstduo en zijn inmiddels ook gescheiden.

Waarom social design? „Onze abstracte kunst en installaties waren alleen gericht op mensen, om ze inzicht te geven." Met design kan ze zowel de mens als niet-mens dienen. „Als ik alleen maar dingen zou maken uit plastic, die vervolgens alleen in een mens-centrische context zouden bestaan en gebruikt worden, zou ik denk ik heel verdrietig worden."

Voor haar afstudeerproject ontwikkelde ze een ontwerp- en natuurbeheermethodiek, Land-Ally, waarin de mens een „bondgenoot" van de natuur is, „en dus geen gebruiker, heerser of eigenaar ervan". „Wat je doet, is zeggen: wij nemen een stapje en we zien of de natuur ook een stapje neemt, en we ontmoeten elkaar in het midden." Het fyto-extractieproject op De Ceuvel is in feite de Land-Allymethodiek. De bodem wordt samen met de niet-mens hersteld.

Foto's Marte Mei van Haaster

Ze is zich bewust van het spanningsveld tussen haar eco-kunst en de vervuilende mode-industrie. „Tijdens mijn master heb ik geen modellenwerk gedaan, omdat ik dacht: het past niet bij waar ik voor sta. Maar iemand zei toen dat dat eigenlijk hetzelfde is als zeggen: als je geen vlees eet, mag je ook niet vliegen."

Van Haaster besloot in de modewereld actief te blijven. „Uiteindelijk voelt het laffer om te zeggen: 'Ik ga weg.' Je bereikt er niks mee. Ja, jij schrijft een keer in de krant dat Marte is gestopt. Oké, gefeliciflapstaart, maar niemand heeft daar wat aan. Er zijn zó veel topmodellen in deze industrie. Als ik zeg: 'Jullie zijn allemaal fucking vervuilend bezig! Ik stop ermee!' Dan zegt iedereen: 'Oké! Doei Marte! Fijn je gekend te hebben!' Het is een druppel op een gloeiende plaat."

Steenresten

Afgelopen modeweek in Parijs liep Van Haaster onder meer shows voor The Row en Duran Lantink - „een van mijn beste vrienden". Dat deed ze omdat ze toch in Parijs was, voor designbeurs Matter and Shape. Daar stond ze met een muur, koffietafel, vloer, bankje en lamp die ze van steenresten van natuursteenbedrijf SolidNature had gemaakt. Voor het Franse kledingmerk Sessùn, dat recent een winkel opende in Amsterdam, ontwierp ze een bar van marmer en lampen van porselein.

Sinds maart heeft ze een residentie bij Nesse, een culturele broedplaats in Terneuzen. Die duurt een jaar. „Daar ga ik eigenlijk hetzelfde proberen als bij De Ceuvel maar op grotere schaal." Op een vervuild stuk land worden hennepplanten ingezaaid, die „PFAS moeten afbreken en opnemen". Omdat PFAS geen metaal zijn, kan ze er geen keramiekglazuur van maken. Het wordt „iets" van textiel. Wat precies? Dat weet ze nog niet. „Ik durf gewoon te beginnen en gaandeweg tegen dingen aan te lopen. Dat is hoe het werkt met natuurproducten: je werkt met wat je krijgt."

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Marte Mei van Haaster maakt design waar ook niet-mensen iets aan hebben

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Kan een designer de wereld gezonder achterlaten? Marte Mei van Haaster probeert het in elk geval. Lood, zink, cadmium. In de bodem van creatieve broedplaats...

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Anthropocenes - Human, Inhuman, Posthuman

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Abstract

This intervention provides a selective survey of some of this year's Venice Art Biennale works that deal with water in an analysis that brings together the plural aspect of water with that of the anthropocene. The article does that by working through theory, description of artworks and fiction writing.

Keywords: hydroart, water, fiction

How to Cite:

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A., (2022) "Waters in Anthropocenes: Art, Hydrofeminism and the 59th Venice Art Biennale 2022", Anthropocenes - Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 3(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.1378

In Plural

Water in the Anthropocene is never in the singular. To talk about the or even a water today amidst the plurality of anthropocenic claims and responsibilities is not only an odd essentialisation but almost an epistemological violence. Water is of course everywhere and all connected, coursing through the geological veins of anthropocenic imagination and dread. We are all paddling as best as we can in rising water, lack of water, polluted water, bottled water, borrowed water; but significantly, to paraphrase Kathryn Yusoff ( 2015), we are not all in the same water together. And certainly not in the same way. My water might come in discreet packages, controlled flows, scenic vistas. Her water might be coming in torrents of personal and material disaster, in rising oblivion and aquiferous eradication. And their water might be a constant humidity that reaches up to their knees, never to move up or down, never to become anything more than a gurgling receptacle of their molecules.

So allow me to pluralise, spread and overflow: water in the Anthropocene is always waters.

Is there a conflict, however, between the need for slow and meticulous pluralising when it comes to working with waters and the urgency to take action in the time of the Anthropocene? Astrida Neimanis ( 2016: 170) writes:

Rather than responding to the alarm clock ring of the Anthropocene with a quick insistence that we are all in this together, [bodies of water] seeks to acknowledge the unsettled terms in which we live as bodies of water, with other watery bodies that materialize in temporal and spatial tangles.

On the surface, the hydrofeminist approach developed by Neimanis and the geological and sociopolitical narrative of the Anthropocene appear incompatible. But I would argue differently: the need for a measured response in view of unsettled boundaries amongst bodies of water is actually confluent with the justified urgency of environmental collapse augured by the Anthropocene. If anything, hydromultiplicity is similar to the anthropocene discourse on how human responsibility, but also involvement with the anthropocene and its consequences, differ across the globe. I see this as an opportunity to consider varying response speeds from different knowledge bodies. All practices, knowledges and disciplines working on these issues now have a responsibility to move in that direction: to plurify themselves by dissolving the boundaries that kept them dry and in complicit discretion.

The multiplicity of waters foamily pools in the middle of the multiplicity of anthropocene, and there we have a truly material, embodied and buoyant version of anthropocenes.

Hydroart

One of these practices is art. We have witnessed an extraordinary increase of ecoart and specifically hydroart in the past decade or so ( Bailey-Charteris 2021), with such initiatives as Ocean Space in Venice or the Floating University in Berlin becoming beacons of such preoccupations. In this vein, here I am attempting an aquatic reading, in the broader context of anthropocenes, of three art installations presented in 2022 in Venice during the 59th Art Biennale. All are national participations (Serbia, Latvia, Denmark). The reasons for which I chose to focus on these works will become apparent below; however, on a basic level they all deal with water in varying degrees, whether explicitly, partially, representationally or conceptually. This becomes especially important in view of the fact that the lagunar city is constantly present, whatever one chooses to show here. Many participating artists across the decades of the Biennale have turned to water as the main element through which their projects operate. This is both a response to the location, and a contribution to what I have elsewhere (2019) called an elemental turn in art and thinking practices.

I must stress that these are by no means the only artists dealing with water in this Biennale. Malta's participation Astute Diplomacy by Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and Brian Schembri drew a great deal of attention, also because of the way water was used as a bridge between canonical art references and technological colonisation; Italy's national participation mid-twentieth century industrial trajectory History of Night and Destiny of Comets by Gian Maria Tosatti culminated in a vast pitch-dark volume of water speckled by some faint lights in what could be interpreted as a gesture of hope as well as a signifier of increased alienation; David Cass's Where Once the Waters connected miniature seascapes on found tin boxes with letters written by people affected by sea-rising; and my exhibition Our Distance Became Water dealt with water in the form of material and representational connections of rising waters between Venice and various precarious Pacific islands.

Hydromethod/Wavewriting

I chose to focus on the specific artworks because I found them to be the most appropriate for yet another disciplinary bleeding I would like to perform here: my commentary on each artwork is paired with a hydrofiction extract from either The Book of Water, a collection of short stories I published in 2017; or my soon to be published novel Our Distance Became Water, which is also the conceptual fiction work behind some of my art practice. This idea came to me when, upon seeing Vladimir Nikolić's (Serbian pavilion) work at the preopening of the Biennale, a short story I had written not long ago came rushing to my mind. I took the liberty of sharing it with him, thus laying the basis for further exchange of ideas. We realised that fiction (its textuality, its narrative, its extensions) can work well with the installation. The second reason I am keen on trying out the fiction route in relation to hydroart is because I want to follow the practice of the Danish artist Uffe Isolotto who, for the accompanying literature of the installation, wrote the short story And Now We Are Water. In the first instance, the story seems unrelated to the main pavilion. But the parallels between them run as powerfully as underground water.

This disciplinary bleeding between different practices and knowledges, such as art and literature, is in the core of the greater methodological challenge I have set myself, namely, to write water in the texts, not just metaphorically but as a method. I ( Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022a) have called this wavewriting, the all-connected yet perpetually withdrawing turn of phrase that does not lead to clear conclusions, truths and certainties, but to an accumulation of wavings that approximate a direction without a thesis. An ondoyant writing methodology: 'the language of waveshape' ( Ming-Yi 2014). It is the kind of wavewriting I am aiming at: small waves, not showy, coming from multiple directions. Confluence and conflict, a constantly postponed gratification, a deliberate postponement of the horizon. On the one hand, I want to encourage the disciplinary confluences implicitly, quietly; on the other, I want to allow the disciplinary conflicts to remain unresolved but not jarring. An open invitation of pluralising rather than a strategy. Take your time. Speculate. Oscillate. Feel safe. Wavewriting to accommodate the three meanings of the word Nalu in the Hawai'ian Kanaka language: wave/to ponder and to speculate/amnion, amniotic fluid ( Amimoto Ingersoll 2016).

Virginia Woolf ( 2000) manages it well: 'The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall... The waves fell; withdrew and fell again." Woolf wavewrote a narrative of whirls, reversals and non-endings, untruths and unquests.

More than mere discourse, wavewriting is an ocean methodology ( Mawani 2018), a seascape epistemology ( Amimoto Ingersoll 2016), a wet ontology ( Steinberg & Peters 2015), an enquiry of submerged perspectives Gómez-Barris 2017). It is persistent, fathoming, layering, uncovering. Like Michel Serres's ( 1995) analysis of la belle noiseuse, the repetitive ruckus of waves, the noise that reveals existence. It is also about a readiness to ride a certain wave. It is collective, and at ease with losing control and becoming one with the elemental.

And here is a bit of a political recommendation: we must mingle disciplinary practices and draw inspiration from it all. We need to move towards (but without claiming) this strategic horizon of planetary change while rinsing ourselves off the politicisation of fixed positions.
We Walked the Earth
Uffe Isolotto

In the two rooms of the Danish pavilion in the Giardini of the Biennale, two oversized and unnervingly life-like centaurs lie dying. A female centaur that has just given birth lies either dead or unconscious on the floor, the new-born baby still in its amniotic sac. In the room next to it, the male centaur is hanging from the ceiling, his powerful neck reduced to a bunch of unpulsing sinews, his six limbs hanging lifeless over the heads of the visitors. He could have been the father who killed himself, unable to bear the birth of the child in this world. The false freedom to decide one's end, when the total end has already been decided for you. We are invited to walk around the most intimate death spasm of the last human hybrids. They walked the earth but no longer. We are witnessing the end of a world in all its parallels with our current world.

And then, on our way out, we pick up the accompanying brochure, a short story written by Jacob Lillemose on a concept by him and the artist, that starts, 'There is water everywhere. Everywhere we have ever been and where we are now. Water is our life. We're made to live in water, and we're made of water.' So far, so bodies of water. But it soon becomes obvious that we are talking about something slightly different: 'Not the same water that surrounds our body, although it could easily be mistaken for it. The water that is our body is the new water. A water filled with miniscule units that allow us to transform our bodies into anything at all.' And so it starts, a journey of lapping Ovidian transformation of this unidentified 'we', the water-body, with 'no fixed form or dimensions.' We join this journey of continuous encounters with other bodies that emerge from the bottom of the sea. We never know what these bodies are. The description is always volumetric, 'tall, rounded bodies', 'small, hard, angular bodies with six sides', 'an oval that is open on one side'. We go through something that might be a human body, in the cracks and the holes and out the other side, until we are pulled by 'a perfect little orb of soft material', a pulsing heart of a thing with its brief, rhythmic tugs. We are in the microverse of a body, surrounded by organs and bones, 'we feel the body's every detail. Fill it out entirely.'

We are given a small, tentative hope. Not a hope that humanity will continue the way it is. But a hope that we humans might be discovered by other bodies, the watery bouncy otherness of the shifting water molecules, explorative, playful, alien yet part of us. Might this be the anthropocene sequence? A diffused consciousness that shapeshifts and bounces in our bodily crevices and valleys from where our existence used to emerge?
Underbelly

So what? Does it really matter that there are no streets? We can swim after all. (...) We snub boats. We only use them to transfer large things. And even then, others come from out there with their boats and their language and their weird yells, and they transfer for us the things we need. It costs a lot, but it's worth every penny. I think we scorn boats because if we use them, then this thing might never happen. Not that it happens all the time. But when it does, especially when we swim at night and the light from the windows is reflected on the canals, that's when we are all glad not to be using boats. So, as we're doing our usual strokes and we're thinking whatever everyone thinks when they're coming home from work or going out in the evening, we sometimes decide to give in to this thing that pulls us into the deep ever since we were born and maybe even before: a collective rambling in our underbellies, like seaweed hands pulling us under, further below the gold green surface, deeper still than the dark green almost brown of the seabed. On that level something else begins, like a city, which we sometimes call the foundation and at other times we don't give it a name, and we talk about it through bubbles that come out of our mouths when we meet down there. And as we go deeper and deeper, our eyes pour out and become one with the steaming water at the centre of the earth, our hair tangles with other hair from other bodies and weaves a mythology of womb, and our feet float on air from other planets. We become one with everything down there, with friends who happen to be in the deep at the same time, with tourists who got lost and accidentally ended up there, with the dead and the ones that might never be born. But also with winged and glassy bodies, with trembling stamens and slumberous roots, with the whole city above and even higher, with a universe that ceaselessly swims in a borderless water bubble.

(extract from The Book of Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022)

Walking with Water
Vladimir Nikolić

Two giant projections, one horizontal, one vertical. Water everywhere. On the horizontal, the perfect horizon. A body of sea water of the most characteristic sea blue with not even a trace of foam. Light lapping wavelets that seem only to bounce, never to end up anywhere. Vast. Eighteen kilometres latitudinally of open sea. On the vertical projection, an Olympic swimming pool, lined up and empty except for the body of the artist-as-swimmer tracing the length of each lane, a perfect vertical horizon seen from above. The swimmer runs through the whole width of the pool, one lane at a time, in a loop.

On the horizontal projection, all 18 metres of it, we are confronted with pure ontology. Nikolić 'took away the power inscribed by the laws of perspective and optics to fix the subject in a single point in space' (2022: 82). Here, there is no observer, no viewpoint, no angle. Here all is pure element. 'The space is seen directly from the water, at eye height, not from a distance' (Nikolić 2022: 104). This is the closest we get to 'an abstractedly, completely even state that does not create any expectation, that does not promise any change, in which both air and water are clean and evenly colored surfaces' ( Nikolić 2022: 105). What, for Nikolić, is 'the reality of the image' for my purposes is the ontology of the element. While everything seems to be offered in full flat visibility, the element itself perpetually withdraws. This is the paradox of being constantly connected and yet withdrawn. What are the waters? Where is the boundary of the element? Where is our hook to its identity? We are given nothing. The waters are all there is, and in this absolute abstraction, the waters withdraw in their pure elementarity. They are simultaneously everything and nothing. They are rising from below, swallowing up all structures. The waters cover the globe, a flood of pure anthropocenic dimensions, replacing with their horizontality all human verticality.

On the vertical projection, the artist films himself swimming. A double: 'To think the abstract space and at the same time to be in it bodily' ( Nikolić 2022: 107). Or as Dejan Sretenović ( 2022: 41) writes in his analysis of Nikolić's work, 'the homo duplex situation of a contemporary artist: when he speaks about institutions he speaks in his own voice and the voice of the institution, revealing himself as an institutionalized subject.' This is the image of the anthropocene: seeing our ghost on this planet after our demise, from a temporal and spatial distance, post-extinction and from a vantage point to appreciate our departing presence. The swimmer has already been replaced by his image; further, his image has been replaced by its repetition. The body of the artist becomes one with the rectangular pool, swimming on an endless straight line, absolutely institutionalised, interpellated by the rectilinearity of the repetition. These are the rules of the game: 'swimming is a total reduction and repetition, pure thought about movement in the perfect container for space and time' ( Nikolić 2022: 91).

There is justice in this, a form of spatial justice, where bodies vie for the same space at the same time. There is mastery and yet resignation. Full-blown presence and withdrawal. There is still the grand delusion of the human ('In water I can almost touch space and time. I can brush up against them' [ Nikolić 2022: 77]), so vainglorious, so understandable, so seductive. But there is an attempt at erasing oneself, or at least of becoming aware of one's permeability, one's irreducible connectivity and ontological withdrawal. Or how, even when fully vertical, the human becomes submerged in the absolute horizontality of the waters.

Perhaps this is why, as opposed to the centaurs, the swimmer still walks. Walking with (in this case, with water), quoting Juanita Sundberg ( 2014: 45) means 'respect for the multiplicity of life worlds...learning to learn about multiplicity.' The swimmer is already the vanishing line, the evanescent contour of a body of water.

His swimming style had always been gauche, evidently self-taught and serving a purpose rather than made to look good. Nothing compared to the beautiful mechanics of other swimmers, sliding over the waves as if truly belonging. His was all noisy and fractured, making it up as he went along. Perhaps because he never learned how to breathe when swimming and was gulping water instead. His inbreath was filled with waves, his outbreath mixed with overworked drool. But there was one thing he always did almost methodically: he only sucked in the water when his head was turned left, always on the side of the heart. And he exhaled the water a couple of arm-lengths later, but always to his right, head still dipped in the water, web-like saliva flow entering the body of the sea. Despite his shortcomings, he was fast and could carry on for long distances. He had once seen himself swimming from above (a documentary on winter swimmers or something). Months later, they sent him the video. He did not manage to watch the whole thing - he got bored and, anyway, it was not so much about winter swimmers after all. It was about people swimming in polluted waters, desperate people risking lives in various places around the world. He knew the sea was polluted of course. He saw something when he watched himself from above that he could not have known otherwise: his body was moving along a line so straight and precise, cutting the waters so perfectly, that at first he really doubted it was him swimming. It was as if the line were there before him and he was simply tracing it with his body, allowing it to emerge from underneath the water surface. But no, he was the one making it. He could see that clearly. It was a windless day when they filmed him, the sea calm, looking even calmer from high up. Yet the sea was split into two. The water on the left of his body was soft and smooth, lulling wavelets licking the air, a lake-like constancy unperturbed by his awkward flaying. And to his other side, the water was rippling with a strobe striation, filled with flashes of incandescent reflection like a pool busy with kids at lunchtime. From high up, the whole sea surface was split into two, smooth and striated linked up by that perfectly straight line he was tracing on the water. And right in the thick of this line, at its very birth point, his own inconsistent arm movements and his head splashing in the waters, mouth open swishing and spitting, mixing waters while keeping them separate.

(extract from The Book of Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022b)

Selling Water by the River
Skuja Braden

The Latvian pavilion is found almost at the end of the Venice Arsenale. Arriving, one feels as if stepping into a river delta, borne there by the art trajectory coursing through the long Arsenale building, and gently deposited into a world made out of clay, water, wild imaginings, irony, eroticism, queerness, fierce critique, frumpy comfort. It can feel bewildering, and this is perhaps why, upon entry, the visitor is furnished with a folded map of the space, a diagram of domestic perambulations ('bedroom, washroom, dining table, studio/kitchen, vanity, altar'), or as the curators write, 'the map of the mental, physical, and spiritual areas of Skuja Braden's Home at the Latvian pavilion' ( Silapetere & Krese 2022a).

These physical and conceptual zones are traversed by a river, a flow that

dissolves the boundaries between not only private and public but also nature and home. Water flows through and past any difference, and in so doing offers us one of the richest images of what it could mean to be together. The water enveloping the house here...signals the idea of a radical collectivism ( Silapetere & Krese, 2022a).

Water here is used in its most explicit and faithful hydrofeminist version, where bodies of water 'recognize the need to understand waters as emplaced, specific, and contingent on relations' ( Neimanis 2016: 170). The sense of scale in Selling Water by the River is local and at the same time open to the global, including it both as an opportunity of collective co-emergence and a space of responsibility.

Ingūna Skuja and Melissa D. Braden are the artist duo Skuja Braden behind Selling Water by the River. Theirs is 'a love story' ( Silapetere & Krese 2022b: 23) that unfolds both between each other, and between them and the material. The attention to detail is stupefying, and the invitation to their fluid domesticity is intimate and unnerving at the same time. But the most captivating space of the installation is the bedroom: a vertical seabed of intense flowing intimacy between the two artists embracing each other and a cornucopia of animate and inanimate bodies that float around them. The bed is made out of porcelain, the water in it thrown into relief through the image of a gently foaming sea, all of which is mounted on the wall, a bed that also becomes an upright monument to aquatic intimacy.

This is a new vertical, a grand hope for the future, where the classic anthropocentric verticality that elevated us from the ground, whether corporeally or technologically, can be thought of differently, and not only as the thing that brings about our current planetary melt-down. Skuja Braden shows us this different way of thinking of the vertical, where the local intimate and the global collective merge, embodying queer ecology's adage that 'asks us to respond to wounds of other bodily waters in which we are implicated, even at a distance' ( Neimanis 2016: 170). The Latvian pavilion is a space of healing, where waters are invited in to mix and proliferate, and where the fear towards the outside is transformed into a softness that is all-enveloping. This is what the title means: this knowledge is already here, next to us, within access. There is no need to make a fuss about it. We just need to lean over the river and drink.

We bickered about many things, but one thing got to me more frequently: you never locked the door during the night. I could never tell whether you forgot, as you said, or you were simply trying to prove a point about safety or openness or something. I always had to make sure that I locked before going to bed, even if you were the last one to come back to the flat.

My reasons were quite specific: not so much to keep the world out but to keep our water in, to stop it from running out and mixing with the water outside. Oh yes, water had already established itself in our life and by now had become an integral part of our domesticity, a little playful pet that followed us in every room. In fact, we had become rather possessive of our water - our very own water. We still entertained the idea, however tenuous, that our water was special, more limpid, a brighter emerald than any other water.

Yet, some evenings, when we were indulging the mindless pleasures readily available during those dry times, such as watching some silly reality show on TV, I'm sure that we were both sharing the same lurking doubt that perhaps our water wasn't that special after all. We never talked about this. In fact, I cannot know that it is not just me, but I really could swear that, at those moments, when our feet were idly plodding on the surface, toes flirting with each other's or with the legs of the sofa and the moss-like carpet saturated by our familiar, domesticated water, your eyes would open up to a different world, a world outside where saints and demons might have mixed differently and your presence would have been like a red round hot collateral ready to shriek away in pleasure.

But I never asked you and now it's too late.

What would the point be anyway? I often imagined, no I actually knew, not that I'd seen it but it was as good as that, I certainly heard it happening, anyway it haunted my dreams sometimes, when stress from work and the constant screaming of life became unbearable and my skin crawled away from all other skins, human and planetary: those nights I heard, in my dreams but with this piercingly real sound, as if the alarm clock got morphed into the crackling sound of my dream at the time, I heard the slurping sound of emptying water, waves rushing out from underneath our door, locked or unlocked it didn't matter after all, a domestic kenosis, a horizontal waterfall moving from within our flat and out towards the world, ships draining their waterload, useless as it is and imported from other seas, now ready to be filled with noxious oil, slow and heavy as my dreams, mixing with other waters from other cities; and then, large swathes of water, ours or others' or no-one's, waves sliding on top of other waves but in the opposite direction, this time entering our home and slowly filling what the previous water had left behind, the muddy floors and the wet newspapers we left floating on the floor the previous night, even the bottom shelves of the bookcases with their books bloated and sticky. But the sound would only be woven in my dream, and when we would wake up and look unthinkingly around on our way to the toilet, everything looked the way we had left it the night before, gently filled with our water, as inviting as arms open to the morning.

(extract from Our Distance Became Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2023)

Art that deals with water is not necessarily hydroart in the sense discussed above. But it is rare to employ water in an artistic expression and not be affected by whatever continuum it augurs, whatever ruptures we impose on it, whatever distance there is between human and aquatic, whatever dreams of confluence. In a sense, the aquatic avenue is an obvious candidate for both conceptualisation and acting upon anthropocenic issues, because of the need for plurality, an understanding of perhaps the necessity of boundaries and yet the inevitability of unstoppable crossings, and the absolute dissolution of human exceptionalism when it comes to the hydrocontinuum amongst bodies of water. There is something ironic about witnessing these works in Venice, the city of water that is built on perpetual defiance of the nonhuman (the elemental, the planetary, the aquatic) yet cannot help but precipitously succumb to the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Especially this year, a visit to Venice feels like a sinking symbol of the Anthropocenes.

Notes

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

References

1 Amimoto Ingersoll, K. (2016). Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Duke University Press.

2 Bailey-Charteris, B. (2021). Revealing the Hydrocene: Reflections on Watery Research. PRZEGLĄD KULTUROZNAWCZY, NR 2(48), s. 431-445. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.21.031.14351

3 Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The Extractive Zone. Duke University Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220n3w

4 Mawani, R. (2018). Across Oceans of Law. Duke University Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw995

5 Ming-Yi, W. (2014). The Man with the Compound Eyes (trans. D. Sterk). Vintage.

6 Neimanis, A. (2016). Bodies of Water. Bloomsbury Academic. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275415

7 Nikolić, V., & Ćirić, B. (2022). Walking with Water/Hod Sa Vodom. Exhibition Catalogue. Belgrade: The Museum of Contemporary Art/Mousse Publishing.

8 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2022a). Slash. In Peter Goodrich and Daniela Gandorfer (Eds). Routledge Handbook of Law and Literature. Routledge.

9 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2022b). The Book of Water. Trans. Sakis Kyratzis. London: Eris Press.

10 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (forthcoming, 2023). Our Distance Became Water. London: Eris Press.

11 Serres, M. (1995). Genesis (trans. G. James and J. Nielson). University of Michigan Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14807

12 Silapetere, A., & Krese, S. (2022a). Skuja Baden: Selling Water by the River. Exhibition Map, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

13 Silapetere, A., & Krese, S. (2022b). Skuja Baden: Selling Water by the River. Exhibition Catalogue. Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

14 Sretenović, D. (2022). Voices That Mean Art. In Nikolić, Vladimir with Biljana Ćirić. Walking with Water/Hod Sa Vodom Exhibition Catalogue (pp. 32-47). Belgrade: The Museum of Contemporary Art/Mousse Publishing.

15 Steinberg, P., & Peters, K. (2015).Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(1), 247-264. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p

16 Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33-47. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067

17 Yusoff, K. (2015). Geologic subjects: Nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman. Cultural Geographies, 22(3), 383-407. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014545301

18 Woolf, V. (2000). The Waves. Wordsworth.

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In Plural

Water in the Anthropocene is never in the singular. To talk about the or even a water today amidst the plurality of anthropocenic claims and responsibilities is not only an odd essentialisation but almost an epistemological violence. Water is of course everywhere and all connected, coursing through the geological veins of anthropocenic imagination and dread. We are all paddling as best as we can in rising water, lack of water, polluted water, bottled water, borrowed water; but significantly, to paraphrase Kathryn Yusoff ( 2015), we are not all in the same water together. And certainly not in the same way. My water might come in discreet packages, controlled flows, scenic vistas. Her water might be coming in torrents of personal and material disaster, in rising oblivion and aquiferous eradication. And their water might be a constant humidity that reaches up to their knees, never to move up or down, never to become anything more than a gurgling receptacle of their molecules.

So allow me to pluralise, spread and overflow: water in the Anthropocene is always waters.

Is there a conflict, however, between the need for slow and meticulous pluralising when it comes to working with waters and the urgency to take action in the time of the Anthropocene? Astrida Neimanis ( 2016: 170) writes:

Rather than responding to the alarm clock ring of the Anthropocene with a quick insistence that we are all in this together, [bodies of water] seeks to acknowledge the unsettled terms in which we live as bodies of water, with other watery bodies that materialize in temporal and spatial tangles.

On the surface, the hydrofeminist approach developed by Neimanis and the geological and sociopolitical narrative of the Anthropocene appear incompatible. But I would argue differently: the need for a measured response in view of unsettled boundaries amongst bodies of water is actually confluent with the justified urgency of environmental collapse augured by the Anthropocene. If anything, hydromultiplicity is similar to the anthropocene discourse on how human responsibility, but also involvement with the anthropocene and its consequences, differ across the globe. I see this as an opportunity to consider varying response speeds from different knowledge bodies. All practices, knowledges and disciplines working on these issues now have a responsibility to move in that direction: to plurify themselves by dissolving the boundaries that kept them dry and in complicit discretion.

The multiplicity of waters foamily pools in the middle of the multiplicity of anthropocene, and there we have a truly material, embodied and buoyant version of anthropocenes.

Hydroart

One of these practices is art. We have witnessed an extraordinary increase of ecoart and specifically hydroart in the past decade or so ( Bailey-Charteris 2021), with such initiatives as Ocean Space in Venice or the Floating University in Berlin becoming beacons of such preoccupations. In this vein, here I am attempting an aquatic reading, in the broader context of anthropocenes, of three art installations presented in 2022 in Venice during the 59th Art Biennale. All are national participations (Serbia, Latvia, Denmark). The reasons for which I chose to focus on these works will become apparent below; however, on a basic level they all deal with water in varying degrees, whether explicitly, partially, representationally or conceptually. This becomes especially important in view of the fact that the lagunar city is constantly present, whatever one chooses to show here. Many participating artists across the decades of the Biennale have turned to water as the main element through which their projects operate. This is both a response to the location, and a contribution to what I have elsewhere (2019) called an elemental turn in art and thinking practices.

I must stress that these are by no means the only artists dealing with water in this Biennale. Malta's participation Astute Diplomacy by Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and Brian Schembri drew a great deal of attention, also because of the way water was used as a bridge between canonical art references and technological colonisation; Italy's national participation mid-twentieth century industrial trajectory History of Night and Destiny of Comets by Gian Maria Tosatti culminated in a vast pitch-dark volume of water speckled by some faint lights in what could be interpreted as a gesture of hope as well as a signifier of increased alienation; David Cass's Where Once the Waters connected miniature seascapes on found tin boxes with letters written by people affected by sea-rising; and my exhibition Our Distance Became Water dealt with water in the form of material and representational connections of rising waters between Venice and various precarious Pacific islands.

Hydromethod/Wavewriting

I chose to focus on the specific artworks because I found them to be the most appropriate for yet another disciplinary bleeding I would like to perform here: my commentary on each artwork is paired with a hydrofiction extract from either The Book of Water, a collection of short stories I published in 2017; or my soon to be published novel Our Distance Became Water, which is also the conceptual fiction work behind some of my art practice. This idea came to me when, upon seeing Vladimir Nikolić's (Serbian pavilion) work at the preopening of the Biennale, a short story I had written not long ago came rushing to my mind. I took the liberty of sharing it with him, thus laying the basis for further exchange of ideas. We realised that fiction (its textuality, its narrative, its extensions) can work well with the installation. The second reason I am keen on trying out the fiction route in relation to hydroart is because I want to follow the practice of the Danish artist Uffe Isolotto who, for the accompanying literature of the installation, wrote the short story And Now We Are Water. In the first instance, the story seems unrelated to the main pavilion. But the parallels between them run as powerfully as underground water.

This disciplinary bleeding between different practices and knowledges, such as art and literature, is in the core of the greater methodological challenge I have set myself, namely, to write water in the texts, not just metaphorically but as a method. I ( Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022a) have called this wavewriting, the all-connected yet perpetually withdrawing turn of phrase that does not lead to clear conclusions, truths and certainties, but to an accumulation of wavings that approximate a direction without a thesis. An ondoyant writing methodology: 'the language of waveshape' ( Ming-Yi 2014). It is the kind of wavewriting I am aiming at: small waves, not showy, coming from multiple directions. Confluence and conflict, a constantly postponed gratification, a deliberate postponement of the horizon. On the one hand, I want to encourage the disciplinary confluences implicitly, quietly; on the other, I want to allow the disciplinary conflicts to remain unresolved but not jarring. An open invitation of pluralising rather than a strategy. Take your time. Speculate. Oscillate. Feel safe. Wavewriting to accommodate the three meanings of the word Nalu in the Hawai'ian Kanaka language: wave/to ponder and to speculate/amnion, amniotic fluid ( Amimoto Ingersoll 2016).

Virginia Woolf ( 2000) manages it well: 'The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall... The waves fell; withdrew and fell again." Woolf wavewrote a narrative of whirls, reversals and non-endings, untruths and unquests.

More than mere discourse, wavewriting is an ocean methodology ( Mawani 2018), a seascape epistemology ( Amimoto Ingersoll 2016), a wet ontology ( Steinberg & Peters 2015), an enquiry of submerged perspectives Gómez-Barris 2017). It is persistent, fathoming, layering, uncovering. Like Michel Serres's ( 1995) analysis of la belle noiseuse, the repetitive ruckus of waves, the noise that reveals existence. It is also about a readiness to ride a certain wave. It is collective, and at ease with losing control and becoming one with the elemental.

And here is a bit of a political recommendation: we must mingle disciplinary practices and draw inspiration from it all. We need to move towards (but without claiming) this strategic horizon of planetary change while rinsing ourselves off the politicisation of fixed positions.
We Walked the Earth
Uffe Isolotto

In the two rooms of the Danish pavilion in the Giardini of the Biennale, two oversized and unnervingly life-like centaurs lie dying. A female centaur that has just given birth lies either dead or unconscious on the floor, the new-born baby still in its amniotic sac. In the room next to it, the male centaur is hanging from the ceiling, his powerful neck reduced to a bunch of unpulsing sinews, his six limbs hanging lifeless over the heads of the visitors. He could have been the father who killed himself, unable to bear the birth of the child in this world. The false freedom to decide one's end, when the total end has already been decided for you. We are invited to walk around the most intimate death spasm of the last human hybrids. They walked the earth but no longer. We are witnessing the end of a world in all its parallels with our current world.

And then, on our way out, we pick up the accompanying brochure, a short story written by Jacob Lillemose on a concept by him and the artist, that starts, 'There is water everywhere. Everywhere we have ever been and where we are now. Water is our life. We're made to live in water, and we're made of water.' So far, so bodies of water. But it soon becomes obvious that we are talking about something slightly different: 'Not the same water that surrounds our body, although it could easily be mistaken for it. The water that is our body is the new water. A water filled with miniscule units that allow us to transform our bodies into anything at all.' And so it starts, a journey of lapping Ovidian transformation of this unidentified 'we', the water-body, with 'no fixed form or dimensions.' We join this journey of continuous encounters with other bodies that emerge from the bottom of the sea. We never know what these bodies are. The description is always volumetric, 'tall, rounded bodies', 'small, hard, angular bodies with six sides', 'an oval that is open on one side'. We go through something that might be a human body, in the cracks and the holes and out the other side, until we are pulled by 'a perfect little orb of soft material', a pulsing heart of a thing with its brief, rhythmic tugs. We are in the microverse of a body, surrounded by organs and bones, 'we feel the body's every detail. Fill it out entirely.'

We are given a small, tentative hope. Not a hope that humanity will continue the way it is. But a hope that we humans might be discovered by other bodies, the watery bouncy otherness of the shifting water molecules, explorative, playful, alien yet part of us. Might this be the anthropocene sequence? A diffused consciousness that shapeshifts and bounces in our bodily crevices and valleys from where our existence used to emerge?
Underbelly

So what? Does it really matter that there are no streets? We can swim after all. (...) We snub boats. We only use them to transfer large things. And even then, others come from out there with their boats and their language and their weird yells, and they transfer for us the things we need. It costs a lot, but it's worth every penny. I think we scorn boats because if we use them, then this thing might never happen. Not that it happens all the time. But when it does, especially when we swim at night and the light from the windows is reflected on the canals, that's when we are all glad not to be using boats. So, as we're doing our usual strokes and we're thinking whatever everyone thinks when they're coming home from work or going out in the evening, we sometimes decide to give in to this thing that pulls us into the deep ever since we were born and maybe even before: a collective rambling in our underbellies, like seaweed hands pulling us under, further below the gold green surface, deeper still than the dark green almost brown of the seabed. On that level something else begins, like a city, which we sometimes call the foundation and at other times we don't give it a name, and we talk about it through bubbles that come out of our mouths when we meet down there. And as we go deeper and deeper, our eyes pour out and become one with the steaming water at the centre of the earth, our hair tangles with other hair from other bodies and weaves a mythology of womb, and our feet float on air from other planets. We become one with everything down there, with friends who happen to be in the deep at the same time, with tourists who got lost and accidentally ended up there, with the dead and the ones that might never be born. But also with winged and glassy bodies, with trembling stamens and slumberous roots, with the whole city above and even higher, with a universe that ceaselessly swims in a borderless water bubble.

(extract from The Book of Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022)

Walking with Water
Vladimir Nikolić

Two giant projections, one horizontal, one vertical. Water everywhere. On the horizontal, the perfect horizon. A body of sea water of the most characteristic sea blue with not even a trace of foam. Light lapping wavelets that seem only to bounce, never to end up anywhere. Vast. Eighteen kilometres latitudinally of open sea. On the vertical projection, an Olympic swimming pool, lined up and empty except for the body of the artist-as-swimmer tracing the length of each lane, a perfect vertical horizon seen from above. The swimmer runs through the whole width of the pool, one lane at a time, in a loop.

On the horizontal projection, all 18 metres of it, we are confronted with pure ontology. Nikolić 'took away the power inscribed by the laws of perspective and optics to fix the subject in a single point in space' (2022: 82). Here, there is no observer, no viewpoint, no angle. Here all is pure element. 'The space is seen directly from the water, at eye height, not from a distance' (Nikolić 2022: 104). This is the closest we get to 'an abstractedly, completely even state that does not create any expectation, that does not promise any change, in which both air and water are clean and evenly colored surfaces' ( Nikolić 2022: 105). What, for Nikolić, is 'the reality of the image' for my purposes is the ontology of the element. While everything seems to be offered in full flat visibility, the element itself perpetually withdraws. This is the paradox of being constantly connected and yet withdrawn. What are the waters? Where is the boundary of the element? Where is our hook to its identity? We are given nothing. The waters are all there is, and in this absolute abstraction, the waters withdraw in their pure elementarity. They are simultaneously everything and nothing. They are rising from below, swallowing up all structures. The waters cover the globe, a flood of pure anthropocenic dimensions, replacing with their horizontality all human verticality.

On the vertical projection, the artist films himself swimming. A double: 'To think the abstract space and at the same time to be in it bodily' ( Nikolić 2022: 107). Or as Dejan Sretenović ( 2022: 41) writes in his analysis of Nikolić's work, 'the homo duplex situation of a contemporary artist: when he speaks about institutions he speaks in his own voice and the voice of the institution, revealing himself as an institutionalized subject.' This is the image of the anthropocene: seeing our ghost on this planet after our demise, from a temporal and spatial distance, post-extinction and from a vantage point to appreciate our departing presence. The swimmer has already been replaced by his image; further, his image has been replaced by its repetition. The body of the artist becomes one with the rectangular pool, swimming on an endless straight line, absolutely institutionalised, interpellated by the rectilinearity of the repetition. These are the rules of the game: 'swimming is a total reduction and repetition, pure thought about movement in the perfect container for space and time' ( Nikolić 2022: 91).

There is justice in this, a form of spatial justice, where bodies vie for the same space at the same time. There is mastery and yet resignation. Full-blown presence and withdrawal. There is still the grand delusion of the human ('In water I can almost touch space and time. I can brush up against them' [ Nikolić 2022: 77]), so vainglorious, so understandable, so seductive. But there is an attempt at erasing oneself, or at least of becoming aware of one's permeability, one's irreducible connectivity and ontological withdrawal. Or how, even when fully vertical, the human becomes submerged in the absolute horizontality of the waters.

Perhaps this is why, as opposed to the centaurs, the swimmer still walks. Walking with (in this case, with water), quoting Juanita Sundberg ( 2014: 45) means 'respect for the multiplicity of life worlds...learning to learn about multiplicity.' The swimmer is already the vanishing line, the evanescent contour of a body of water.

His swimming style had always been gauche, evidently self-taught and serving a purpose rather than made to look good. Nothing compared to the beautiful mechanics of other swimmers, sliding over the waves as if truly belonging. His was all noisy and fractured, making it up as he went along. Perhaps because he never learned how to breathe when swimming and was gulping water instead. His inbreath was filled with waves, his outbreath mixed with overworked drool. But there was one thing he always did almost methodically: he only sucked in the water when his head was turned left, always on the side of the heart. And he exhaled the water a couple of arm-lengths later, but always to his right, head still dipped in the water, web-like saliva flow entering the body of the sea. Despite his shortcomings, he was fast and could carry on for long distances. He had once seen himself swimming from above (a documentary on winter swimmers or something). Months later, they sent him the video. He did not manage to watch the whole thing - he got bored and, anyway, it was not so much about winter swimmers after all. It was about people swimming in polluted waters, desperate people risking lives in various places around the world. He knew the sea was polluted of course. He saw something when he watched himself from above that he could not have known otherwise: his body was moving along a line so straight and precise, cutting the waters so perfectly, that at first he really doubted it was him swimming. It was as if the line were there before him and he was simply tracing it with his body, allowing it to emerge from underneath the water surface. But no, he was the one making it. He could see that clearly. It was a windless day when they filmed him, the sea calm, looking even calmer from high up. Yet the sea was split into two. The water on the left of his body was soft and smooth, lulling wavelets licking the air, a lake-like constancy unperturbed by his awkward flaying. And to his other side, the water was rippling with a strobe striation, filled with flashes of incandescent reflection like a pool busy with kids at lunchtime. From high up, the whole sea surface was split into two, smooth and striated linked up by that perfectly straight line he was tracing on the water. And right in the thick of this line, at its very birth point, his own inconsistent arm movements and his head splashing in the waters, mouth open swishing and spitting, mixing waters while keeping them separate.

(extract from The Book of Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2022b)

Selling Water by the River
Skuja Braden

The Latvian pavilion is found almost at the end of the Venice Arsenale. Arriving, one feels as if stepping into a river delta, borne there by the art trajectory coursing through the long Arsenale building, and gently deposited into a world made out of clay, water, wild imaginings, irony, eroticism, queerness, fierce critique, frumpy comfort. It can feel bewildering, and this is perhaps why, upon entry, the visitor is furnished with a folded map of the space, a diagram of domestic perambulations ('bedroom, washroom, dining table, studio/kitchen, vanity, altar'), or as the curators write, 'the map of the mental, physical, and spiritual areas of Skuja Braden's Home at the Latvian pavilion' ( Silapetere & Krese 2022a).

These physical and conceptual zones are traversed by a river, a flow that

dissolves the boundaries between not only private and public but also nature and home. Water flows through and past any difference, and in so doing offers us one of the richest images of what it could mean to be together. The water enveloping the house here...signals the idea of a radical collectivism ( Silapetere & Krese, 2022a).

Water here is used in its most explicit and faithful hydrofeminist version, where bodies of water 'recognize the need to understand waters as emplaced, specific, and contingent on relations' ( Neimanis 2016: 170). The sense of scale in Selling Water by the River is local and at the same time open to the global, including it both as an opportunity of collective co-emergence and a space of responsibility.

Ingūna Skuja and Melissa D. Braden are the artist duo Skuja Braden behind Selling Water by the River. Theirs is 'a love story' ( Silapetere & Krese 2022b: 23) that unfolds both between each other, and between them and the material. The attention to detail is stupefying, and the invitation to their fluid domesticity is intimate and unnerving at the same time. But the most captivating space of the installation is the bedroom: a vertical seabed of intense flowing intimacy between the two artists embracing each other and a cornucopia of animate and inanimate bodies that float around them. The bed is made out of porcelain, the water in it thrown into relief through the image of a gently foaming sea, all of which is mounted on the wall, a bed that also becomes an upright monument to aquatic intimacy.

This is a new vertical, a grand hope for the future, where the classic anthropocentric verticality that elevated us from the ground, whether corporeally or technologically, can be thought of differently, and not only as the thing that brings about our current planetary melt-down. Skuja Braden shows us this different way of thinking of the vertical, where the local intimate and the global collective merge, embodying queer ecology's adage that 'asks us to respond to wounds of other bodily waters in which we are implicated, even at a distance' ( Neimanis 2016: 170). The Latvian pavilion is a space of healing, where waters are invited in to mix and proliferate, and where the fear towards the outside is transformed into a softness that is all-enveloping. This is what the title means: this knowledge is already here, next to us, within access. There is no need to make a fuss about it. We just need to lean over the river and drink.

We bickered about many things, but one thing got to me more frequently: you never locked the door during the night. I could never tell whether you forgot, as you said, or you were simply trying to prove a point about safety or openness or something. I always had to make sure that I locked before going to bed, even if you were the last one to come back to the flat.

My reasons were quite specific: not so much to keep the world out but to keep our water in, to stop it from running out and mixing with the water outside. Oh yes, water had already established itself in our life and by now had become an integral part of our domesticity, a little playful pet that followed us in every room. In fact, we had become rather possessive of our water - our very own water. We still entertained the idea, however tenuous, that our water was special, more limpid, a brighter emerald than any other water.

Yet, some evenings, when we were indulging the mindless pleasures readily available during those dry times, such as watching some silly reality show on TV, I'm sure that we were both sharing the same lurking doubt that perhaps our water wasn't that special after all. We never talked about this. In fact, I cannot know that it is not just me, but I really could swear that, at those moments, when our feet were idly plodding on the surface, toes flirting with each other's or with the legs of the sofa and the moss-like carpet saturated by our familiar, domesticated water, your eyes would open up to a different world, a world outside where saints and demons might have mixed differently and your presence would have been like a red round hot collateral ready to shriek away in pleasure.

But I never asked you and now it's too late.

What would the point be anyway? I often imagined, no I actually knew, not that I'd seen it but it was as good as that, I certainly heard it happening, anyway it haunted my dreams sometimes, when stress from work and the constant screaming of life became unbearable and my skin crawled away from all other skins, human and planetary: those nights I heard, in my dreams but with this piercingly real sound, as if the alarm clock got morphed into the crackling sound of my dream at the time, I heard the slurping sound of emptying water, waves rushing out from underneath our door, locked or unlocked it didn't matter after all, a domestic kenosis, a horizontal waterfall moving from within our flat and out towards the world, ships draining their waterload, useless as it is and imported from other seas, now ready to be filled with noxious oil, slow and heavy as my dreams, mixing with other waters from other cities; and then, large swathes of water, ours or others' or no-one's, waves sliding on top of other waves but in the opposite direction, this time entering our home and slowly filling what the previous water had left behind, the muddy floors and the wet newspapers we left floating on the floor the previous night, even the bottom shelves of the bookcases with their books bloated and sticky. But the sound would only be woven in my dream, and when we would wake up and look unthinkingly around on our way to the toilet, everything looked the way we had left it the night before, gently filled with our water, as inviting as arms open to the morning.

(extract from Our Distance Became Water Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2023)

Art that deals with water is not necessarily hydroart in the sense discussed above. But it is rare to employ water in an artistic expression and not be affected by whatever continuum it augurs, whatever ruptures we impose on it, whatever distance there is between human and aquatic, whatever dreams of confluence. In a sense, the aquatic avenue is an obvious candidate for both conceptualisation and acting upon anthropocenic issues, because of the need for plurality, an understanding of perhaps the necessity of boundaries and yet the inevitability of unstoppable crossings, and the absolute dissolution of human exceptionalism when it comes to the hydrocontinuum amongst bodies of water. There is something ironic about witnessing these works in Venice, the city of water that is built on perpetual defiance of the nonhuman (the elemental, the planetary, the aquatic) yet cannot help but precipitously succumb to the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Especially this year, a visit to Venice feels like a sinking symbol of the Anthropocenes.

Notes

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

References

1 Amimoto Ingersoll, K. (2016). Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Duke University Press.

2 Bailey-Charteris, B. (2021). Revealing the Hydrocene: Reflections on Watery Research. PRZEGLĄD KULTUROZNAWCZY, NR 2(48), s. 431-445. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.21.031.14351

3 Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The Extractive Zone. Duke University Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220n3w

4 Mawani, R. (2018). Across Oceans of Law. Duke University Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw995

5 Ming-Yi, W. (2014). The Man with the Compound Eyes (trans. D. Sterk). Vintage.

6 Neimanis, A. (2016). Bodies of Water. Bloomsbury Academic. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275415

7 Nikolić, V., & Ćirić, B. (2022). Walking with Water/Hod Sa Vodom. Exhibition Catalogue. Belgrade: The Museum of Contemporary Art/Mousse Publishing.

8 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2022a). Slash. In Peter Goodrich and Daniela Gandorfer (Eds). Routledge Handbook of Law and Literature. Routledge.

9 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2022b). The Book of Water. Trans. Sakis Kyratzis. London: Eris Press.

10 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (forthcoming, 2023). Our Distance Became Water. London: Eris Press.

11 Serres, M. (1995). Genesis (trans. G. James and J. Nielson). University of Michigan Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14807

12 Silapetere, A., & Krese, S. (2022a). Skuja Baden: Selling Water by the River. Exhibition Map, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

13 Silapetere, A., & Krese, S. (2022b). Skuja Baden: Selling Water by the River. Exhibition Catalogue. Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

14 Sretenović, D. (2022). Voices That Mean Art. In Nikolić, Vladimir with Biljana Ćirić. Walking with Water/Hod Sa Vodom Exhibition Catalogue (pp. 32-47). Belgrade: The Museum of Contemporary Art/Mousse Publishing.

15 Steinberg, P., & Peters, K. (2015).Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(1), 247-264. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p

16 Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33-47. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067

17 Yusoff, K. (2015). Geologic subjects: Nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman. Cultural Geographies, 22(3), 383-407. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014545301

18 Woolf, V. (2000). The Waves. Wordsworth.

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Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos ORCID profile. (opens in new tab)

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Waters in Anthropocenes: Art, Hydrofeminism and the 59th Venice Art Biennale 2022

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This intervention provides a selective survey of some of this year's Venice Art Biennale works that deal with water in an analysis that brings together the plural aspect of water with that of the anthropocene. The article does that by working through theory, description of artworks and fiction writing.

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Rekto_Verso _ Een angstperkje in het denken

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Donna Haraway_ ‘Je moet ’s avonds meer weten dan je ’s ochtends wist’ - NRC

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Donna Haraway - Feministe met een scherp pincet, Eva Hoffman

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Fragment Haraway_ meer dan gezelschapsdieren - Filosofie Magazine