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WATER WOUNDS

Magazine

October
This month's topic: Water WoundsResident Editor: Carlos Monleón

WATER WOUNDS

Under the title Water Wounds, I bring together the practices of four artists and curators for whom the situated plays a fundamental role and in which there is somehow a continuous and formative contact with bodies of water.

Water is not treated as a theme, instead it appears as a means of dissolution that collects the ecocidal and genocidal tendencies of the contemporary condition and serves to connect and examine these drives on different levels.

The metaphor of the water wound as a surface in continuous liquefaction that serves us not only as means of access to a series of deep conflicts, but also as a possibility of healing and reconstitution.

In this bottomless well, metaphors act as communicating vessels between experiences and states of transmutation. In Margarida Mendes’ text, this leads us towards an essentialism of the liquidity of matter that brings us closer to the rhythms and cadences of elemental media. Media here understood as natural/cultural assemblages that are not only containers and environments in themselves but are containers of possibilities that in turn anchor our existence.[1]John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.

This is an invitation to learn from the uncertainty and radical immanence that the oceanic experience offers, understanding the figure of the hydric as a means of dissolution and  circulation of traces of human bio-phobic drives and behaviors, in which the diversity of bodies of water (oceans, rivers, aquifers and wetlands) eventually dissolve.

In conversation with Claudia Pagès , we mention the naturalization of ecocide, the hydrophobic perversity of what were previously “natural catastrophes” now “weaponized” as instruments of war against populations and nations. This naturalization continues the utilization of Orwellian language (as Javier Martinez Gil, guru of fluvial-happiness, calls it) through which water is associated with conflict, scarcity and speculation, and which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in such phrases as “the wars of the future will be water wars.”

Given this utilization, the need arises to redefine our phenomenology associated with water, to project a new relationality with it and to reflect/unfold/somatize the role of language, whether written/inscribed (in watermarks) or pronounced (in exhalations).

Cristina Ramos’ text performs an essential materialism of the origin of the voice, which precedes the organic/organ/organism, by vocalizing the circuits of incorporation of the mineral substrate in the complex material genealogy of the voice. The water wound suppurates in its vaporous manifestations according to the conflicts that emerge from it, and listening thus becomes an act of tuning in and a means of physical, vibrational, transtemporal correspondence.

As finale, Lorenzo Sandoval paves the way for a concept that comes from the synthesis of various experiences situated in song, the fight for the rights of nature and culturally kaleidoscopic musical traditions. On this path towards an Environmelisma, he reflects on the act of giving voice to an environmental lament, a lament that might be asemic but is full of feeling.

(Cover image: Meandros del Ebro, present and past in collaboration with Rosa María Gil. Courtesy of Carlos Monleón)

 

References
↑1 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.
This month's topic
Carlos Monleon (Madrid, 1983) works with a variety of processes and materials, both living and non-living, that result in sculptural and participatory artworks.These span across different levels of bodily sensation and awareness; from the microbiological to the performative and social bodies. His main line of line of work traces evolutionary processes that stem from digestion and cognition and result in the distribution of biological processes across multi-species entanglements and cybernetic metabolisms. Carlos has developed collaborative projects at spaces such as Autoitalia, Seventeen Gallery and Diaspore Project Space, London, Cráter Invertido, Mexico, Hangar, Lisbon as well as institutions  such as CA2M, and Matadero, Madrid, HIAP Helsinki, and has shown his individual practice at LUMA Arles; Z33, Belgium; Kai_ , Tallin; the Istanbul Design Biennial and Porto Design Biennial amongst others.
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