Water Beyond Resource? Making and Thinking through Water

About

This course examines water in its relational, social, and ecological dimensions. Through field trips, artistic practice, readings and critical reflection, we explore water beyond a mere resource and follow its material and imaginative significance.

In Western societies, fresh water is often treated as a resource that is consumed, exploited, polluted, and regulated. It has been taken for granted that there is water – enough and yet not too much. Climate change has shown that this has changed drastically for some parts of the world. In this course we will engage with critical scholarship, field trips, and artistic practice to imagine water beyond a mere resource.

We want to explore water as entangled within relations – as anthropologist Andrea Ballestero suggests: “water is always more than itself”. We will approach fresh water as liquid that has been part of our bodies, as medium, collaborator, archive, or as source of imagination.

Readings and text discussion as well as an exhibition visit will help us to decenter our gaze and develop a methodological framework on how to think through water. A trip to Floating University, a nature-culture learning site in the rainwater retention pool of the former Berlin Tempelhof airport, aims to conceive of water as situated while taking into account its social and ecological implications.

Through cyanotype experiments on fabric and playful underwater writing at a Berlin lake, participants will engage with light, wind, and water, allowing these forces to shape visual and textual artefacts as well as imagination. A crucial element of working directly on-site with natural elements will be to explore what is at hand. In this way, the workshop enables participants to consider how artistic practice can be approached as in situ, spatiotemporal, and sustainable.

The aim of this course is to learn from scholarship and artistic practice ways to imagine water beyond a mere resource and acquire tools to critically reflect upon the present

Course leader

Marie Aline Klinger & Alicia Kremser

Fee info