Water Works (ASLE Spotlight), April 16th, 2021 (original) (raw)

MOÑIVAS, E. “H2o: emergencias” in: FUKS, Suzon (et al.) (Eds.). Water Views: Caring and Daring – Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium 2014 – 3WDS14. Queensland, Australia: Igneous Incorporated, 2015, pp. 146-153.

The 2013 International Year of Water Cooperation and the XIII Madrid Science Week were the setting for a series of artistic projects and discussions on water issues, in the Fine Arts School of the Complutense University of Madrid. This program began with a workshop entitled “Art and Science dialogues: Water projects workshop”, directed by the specialist in water and contemporary art, Dr. Esther Moñivas. Held at this school in October, it sought to promote new synergies between these two fields of knowledge. As a starting point, it took water as a driver of the imagination, briefly analyzing contemporary water semantics, and discussing a series of artworks made in the last few decades –specifically those focused on inhabiting the communal space. Secondly, it fostered a debate on the current status of water within the School, addressing it on the political, economical, environmental , sociological, psychological and aesthetic levels. The School was understood for this aim as a complex system and an ecological unit that could draw wider conclusions. In this debate one thing was notable: the lack of information about water management, quality and politics. Ultimately, this workshop stimulated original narratives, solutions and dreams about this public resource. In November, a selection of the artistic projects born in this context were introduced and discussed by the curator Esther Moñivas and the artist Eva Lootz. The School also hosted performances and an exhibition entitled “h2o: emergencias”, which included videoart, installation, painting and textual works (La Trasera, Fine Arts School, UCM, 12-15 November). Currently these artworks can be seen on waterbodies.org –the digital platform directed by Victoria Vesna from the Art | Sci Center + Lab in UCLA. Since we feel the whole experience should be disseminated internationally, we propose a lecture about it for the Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium 2014. Complete reference: MOÑIVAS, Esther. “H2o: emergencias” in: FUKS, Suzon (et al.) (Eds.). Water Views: Caring and Daring – Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium 2014 – 3WDS14. Queensland, Australia: Igneous Incorporated, 2015, pp. 146-153. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1552.6567.

2017 International Waters Network Annual Report

2017

2017 was the International WaTERS Network's third year. During this time we worked to further showcase our work and to focus more on research conducted in our case study sites of Cape Town (South Africa), Lima (Peru), and Bangalore (India), particularly to explore the key linkages between them. Again focusing on academic and practitioner workshops in our focal regions, we started to look forward in planning our next steps and secure future funding. Major Events and Activities Narrative Inquiries Workshop-Minneapolis Minnesota, December 13, 2017 The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) at the University of Minnesota teamed up with International WaTERS to put on a one day workshop entitled: ​ Narrative Inquiries: Understanding Questions of Environment and Justice​ which was held December 13, 2017 in Minneapolis Minnesota. The speakers focused on creative engagement following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, writing lives and struggles across borders of languages, genres, disciplines and geographical locations, critical international relations, political and postcolonial theory, and water politics and governance, and critical approaches that engage narrative to understand lived experience of water access. We are deeply grateful to ​ Karen Brown​ and ICGC for the opportunity to engage creatively and critically on issues of narrative inquiry, and particularly to explore the potential utility of these approaches and modes of engagement for work on water, environmental justice, and social equity concerns of interest to the Network.

Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein: Two places: working and walking with waterways (2019)

100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, 2019

This is a chapter in a collaboratively authored book by the MECO Network from University of Wollongong. The full book is available at Open Humanities Press, here: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/ - - - We (Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein) are artists living in Wollongong. This chapter offers a meditation on our experiences working in these two places, near and far. What connects both the places and the artworks is water. The cultural and ecologi- cal communities in Wollongong and Mackay are deeply shaped by water’s inexorable downhill flow. Our text flows back and forth between these two loci, reflecting on our working methods as examples of socially engaged art, and considers how these might enable an ongoing process of embodied learning. Through structured aesthetic experience around waterways in Mackay and Wollongong, our goal is to become more deeply embedded in these places, and to facilitate transformed relationships with land, water and ecology.

Southern Waters: A Creative and Critical Symposium

2021

Where: The University of Adelaide & Online When: 1-3 Dec 2021: 5-7pm, 1 Dec; 2-7.30pm, 2 Dec; 10am-7pm, 3 Dec (ACDS: UTC/GMT +10:30) Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/206978507287 Water describes and sounds the South in resonant and manifold ways. This symposium attends to the tones and contours of Southern Waters as they flow across the ‘unique world’ of the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, connecting and infusing the landmasses and islands of the South while circulating through the hydrosphere that distinguishes our planet. It considers the pressure that water – or its absence – places on creative form and on critical thought, and how water gives shape to understandings and performances of place in the world. Located in South Australia and focused particularly on the regions of Australasia and southern/eastern Africa, along with South/Asia, it is interested also in how water offers a medium for thinking between the global South and the geographic South and in what it means to inhabit the driest state of the driest continent on earth. Featuring readings, performances and screenings of work by acclaimed and emerging writers, choreographers and musicians, the symposium brings creative practitioners and critical thinkers together in a series of conversation panels that reflect on the waters that flood into and infuse Australian literatures, as well as on writing the absence of water in arid states; thinking through wet and dry forms and theories, and across the Indian Ocean; writing rivers in southern lands; immersive and fluid choreographies; and the bejeweling undersea and inland seas of Australia and the ‘oceanic south’.

Social Water: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop

Christine Gilmore, Nicola Pritchard, Sarah Bennison, Will Wright, Hannah Boast, Emilija Lipovsek, George Holmes, Claire Chambers, Jonathan Finch, Niranjana Ramesh, Hetta Howes, Satya Savitzky

"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop 25th October 2013, University of York Call for Papers – deadline 13th September Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture. Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land. This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject. Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to: Water privatisation Water on film Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies Gendered engagements with water Water in religion, performance and ritual Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes Disasters and reconstruction Embodiment, memory and affect The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds. This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."

Story-ing Nature: Water Stories (September 2019)

This response relates to summer thinking about water in the context of nature literacy, the development of a nature identity, and climate action, and developed from the question: "How can children feel connected to, and learn to care for the waters of the planet (e.g. ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, oceans) if they have never seen, touched, heard, or tasted them?"