Aquatic Encounters: Art and Hydrofeminisms

Aquatic Encounters is a two-year research project, which has aimed to summon, employ and activate knowledges from the fields of contemporary art, hydrofeminisms, affect theory, ecofeminisms, and feminist new materialist theory. The project has been driven by the simple, or rather, simply terrifying fact that water as a resource and an all-encompassing matter has always been radically shared by human and non-human bodies - bodies which have always been porous and never sealed. We have been specifically interested in the affective capacities of hydrofeminisms to mobilize embodied thinking about water as a body in an urgent condition of stress. We have suggested that to think about fluid and malleable water with visual arts should be an explicitly political matter.

Grounding the project in our expertise as feminist affect scholars working with new materialisms, we have located ourselves, artworks, artistic practices, and their affective powers to awake and mobilize human watery bodies by offering aquatic artistic encounters with various embodiments in crisis. We claim that the usage of water/watery/hydro or other derivatives in arts are never mere metaphors or poetic sociolinguistic fixations.

In addition to our research, the project has consisted of two elements and process-based outputs: a public online reading group programme realized during the pandemic in 2021 with invited guest hosts and speakers, and an experimental publication we received additional funding for from Kone in 2022. The publication is launched in 2023. The project had to be adjusted to the conditions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and international public gatherings or research trips couldn’t be organised.