‘Since we human and more-than-human animators of life are all bodies of water, we give material form, shape and meaning to that which exists in the abstract in only a very circumscribed way. As part of our lifeworld, water must take up expression in some body, and human embodiment is one of the particular expressions. Water is thus also specifically what we make it, in the sense that it is not simply something “out there” – environment, resource, commodity, backdrop – but also the stuff of human bodies, and never separate from our own incontestable materiality’.

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017)

Anthropocene geological age that is named after the human species that has transformed our fragile planet through global capitalism to one that is characterised by wild weather, drought, floods, fires, warming oceans, melting icebergs and accelerating extinctions of other biological species, this exhibition instead looks at homo sapiens as ‘bodies of water’ that are generative and gestational in their watery embodiment that leaks and seethes in direct opposition to Enlightenment Man’s notion of what Donna Haraway calls ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism’. To stop, in the poet Eugenio Montale’s words, ‘the oblivion of the world’, these human bodies, that are made up of more than two-thirds water, take responsibility and live ecologically. In our age of ‘liquid modernity’ – a term coined by Zygmunt Bauman at the turn of the millenium – where ‘change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’, this exhibition proposes a solution to the sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants that does not depend on short-term economic growth or profit-seeking motives but instead calls for people working in concert to find instinctual answers over the flow of time to life’s challenges.

Marcelle Joseph