PhD Suoyrjö Elina and working group

Aquatic Encounters: Art and Hydrofeminisms

Tieteellinen tutkimus ja taiteellinen työ / niihin pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

Aquatic Encounters is a two-year research project, which aims to summon, employ and activate knowledges from the fields of contemporary art, hydrofeminisms, ecofeminisms, and feminist new materialist theory. The project is driven by the simple, or rather, simply terrifying fact that water as a resource and an all-encompassing matter is radically shared by human and non-human bodies - bodies which are porous and are never sealed. We are specifically interested in the affective capacities of hydrofeminisms to mobilize embodied thinking about water as a body that is in an urgent condition of stress. We suggest that to think about fluid and malleable water with visual arts is an explicitly political matter. Grounding the project in our expertise as feminist affect scholars working with new materialisms, we locate 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. The project consists of four different kinds of elements and process-based outputs: research period with field trips for the grant holders, a public reading group programme, public lectures with leading researchers in hydrofeminisms, and a publication.