Continuing the leitmotif of hybridization, we return to look at the water once again, invited by Agnes Questionmark on a journey through an Underwater Investigation of the Human Being’(2023) where the body and consciousness are part of not only a phenomenological process but of deeper research into the ontology of all things living. Through the act of resistance and resilience against the human body, Agnes Questionmark announces the birth of new species, whose gender and human identity are yet unidentifiable. Feminist phenomenologist Naimanis Astri da invites us to investigate how “re-think[ing] embodiment as watery stir up considerable trouble for humanist understandings”. Contrastingly, the flow and flush of wa- ters connect our bodies to other bodies, to other worlds beyond human selves, up to discussing the idea that bodies are in the first instance only human. Through her performance Drowned in Living Waters (2023), the artist follows the suggestion of philosopher Lucy Irigaray to never leave the sea, where the hydrological cycle has no hierarchy, as our watery past is part of infinite hydro-commonalities that makes life thrive and evolve. “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (everything changes, nothing perishes) said Ovid in his Metamorphoses13; a concept that in Buddhism sits in the idea of impermanen- ce, assessing that all conditioned existence is transient and inconstant. Acknowledging the ephemeral nature of our constructs helps us embrace the possibility of chan- ge: paradigms are not as fixed as we might think. Similar to how water flows and no river is ever the same, we are able to transform constantly as in an endless cycle. Yet, immobilized in the fixity of our beliefs, to the question we posed, “could logos and cosmos embrace each other again?”, we are not able to respond as of now. We might however want to remember the words of structuralist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “the limit of my langua- ge means the limit of my world”, to which Lucy Irgaray would continue with “the evil begins at the birth of your language”.

Valentina Buzzi, curator of Italian Pavilion at Gwangju 23