For centuries, bodies of water have played a crucial role in sustaining life and driving the economy. They’ve been commodified, extracted, polluted, and viewed as mere resources to be exploited. Yet, in an era of ecological crisis, our relationship with water demands a radical rethinking. Cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis challenges us to see water not just as a resource but as a relational entity—one that connects us to the rest of nature and teaches us about solidarity and interdependence. How can we reimagine our connection to water in ways that foster ecological awareness and collective care? The flow and cycle of water thus keeps us connected to our own bodies, but also to other bodies that belong to other living communities outside of our human selves. Our body cells contain water, which has been circulating on Earth for ages. During life (and after death), water circulates in and out of our bodies to circulate again in various states in the bodies of other people and entities. We can imagine that the water in our saliva was perhaps contained in the blood of dinosaurs billions of years ago, or in a river on the other side of the world. Through water, we can thus seek out a path of mutual understanding and connection, a dialogue across time, a process of exchange and transformation. This exhibition brings together artists and researchers who have been exploring these questions for the past 10 months, offering a multi-faceted examination of water’s role in our lives. Each project invites us to engage with water not just as a physical substance but as a medium of connection, memory, and meaning-making.
For this show, me and my colleagues Kosmas Dinh and Mae Lubetkin prepared a collective work called Ambient Tremology. The work reorients the act of listening from the sonic to the vibrant, by gaining contact with trembling matter of amphibious worlds. The installation traces waterways in transition and more-than-human transmission within the soaked and brackish Romanian Danube Delta. With our adapted contact-accelerometer, a tiny tool sensitive to vibrating materials, we attune to the granular memory and ambient force of the Delta vibroscape. Zooming into the vibration of metal poles on the shores, sandy shells touched by the wind, and reeds trembling with insect processions, our haptic experiences stray from the precision of ecotremology and vibroscape science, instead finding voice with the ambient tremors. Here we are interested in the slippery space that opens up where worlds collide: a contact zone. Alongside our situated encounters, we ask: How are we employing fieldwork and recording as processes nurturing an approach of ‘making with’ instead of returning to a colonialist notion of fieldwork as ‘making accessible’? By means of translation, our audio paper offers a sonic space, in dialogue with the recorded vibrations, glimpsing amphibious burrows enmeshing matter and the more-than-human.
To bring the rich and intimate world of vibrations into the gallery space, we use exciters – also known as contact speakers – to activate the wooden walls with vibrations of the Delta and its dwellers. The audience is invited to attune themselves to this subtle, yet visceral experience and to establish the physical contact between their bodies and the bodies of Delta’s waters.
More information about this project is avialable at https://www.inspirationforum.com/iflab and on Display’s gallery website where the show was on in September 2024.
The Inspiration Forum Lab is organized by Ji.hlava IDFF’s Inspiration Forum in cooperation with the Kersnikova Institute, Sensorium and Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice. The project is co-funded by the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Czech State Fund.