Water and Knowledge
online reading session, together with Rebecca Cheong, 2022
Water is everywhere. Water runs and moves things around. Water gestates and proliferates human and nonhuman life. Water preserves material residues and operates as an archive. Water floods, seeps, and evaporates. Water is everywhere. Yet water eludes knowability. Cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis proposes a reassessment of Western paradigms of knowledge and knowledge production through “hydro-logics,” a concept that describes water’s “manners of being and becoming, other movements and ways of organizing bodies.”
This reading session is titled after the eponymous essay by Neimanis (Neimanis, 2017), where the cultural theorist discusses the concept of “thinking with water” as an alternative approach to producing knowledge and addresses its inevitable political limitations. Guided by the idea of “hydro-logics”, the session approaches embodied posthuman experiences of human bodies as bodies of water and raises questions about power and violence implicated in the nature/culture divide and reproduced across human and nonhuman worlds. The session comes with an interactive digital space that includes quotes, images, diagrams, and other visual materials.
presentation: Rockpool, Ocean Archive (TBA21–Academy), 2022