Water and Knowledge
online reading session, together with Rebecca Cheong, 2022
https://here.fm/waterandknowledge
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 takes its title after the eponymous essay by Neimanis, where she talks about the possibilities of producing knowledge with water and their inevitable anthropocentric—and simultaneously political—limitations. Guided by the notion of “hydro-logics”, the session discusses embodied posthuman experiences with water and questions of power, subordination, and master models in the nature/culture divide, in particular, and across human and nonhuman worlds in general. The session is accompanied by an interactive digital space inhabited by quotes, images, diagrams, and other visual materials and is open to participants’ contributions.
presentation: Rockpool, Ocean Archive (TBA21–Academy), 2022