Learning again, or learning for the first time, how to become water

3.5 billion years ago Water gave the beginning of life on Earth. Meanwhile, the anthropocentric capitalist view developed an image of it as a lifeless, colorless economic resource that grows the myth of human supremacy.

We build large and small-scale river dams, embankments, channels and drain systems. And thus, bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are drying out as we pump in earth. Bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are drowning in rising seas and rising temperatures as we pump in air. Bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are poisoned and prematurely dying as we pump in water.

Just as humans are mostly composed of water, three-quarters of the other-than-human and inhuman are wet and blue. Water infiltrates and inhabits the air we breathe and the land we cultivate. As humans, we have no exclusive claim to water. We are bodies of water, just as rivers, trees, insects, and all other other-than-human and inhuman.

Love is a hermeneutics of social change, argued Sandoval.1 For Tanya Berokoff, a teacher in speech communication and lifelong companion with other animals, the “work of real love” is “not about an emotional need to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another.”2

Can we be genuinely loved by the other-than-human and inhuman? Can we genuinely love other-than-human and inhuman?

Can we learn again, or learn for the first time, how to be genuinely loved and how to genuinely love the human, other-than-human and inhuman.

To be genuinely loved by, and love, water. To become water.

Kumjana Novakova
Diogo Pereira

“Capitalism communicates and imposes a view of the body like an island. Cut off. It’s a process of really impoverishment, because the body, our body extends and connects and draws its life, its energy from the surrounding atmosphere.” These are the opening words of Silvia Federici in Angela Anderson’s film that opens our 2nd outreach programme. In coupling cinema, cultural research and the ecofeminist, though ‘material-semiotic entanglements’ of the factual, the fictional, and the fabulated, both the filmic and the documentary become correlated to interact with each to enact a realism of the possible. Thus, the ecofeminist in the cinematic opens possibilities for new forms of narrative and imaginative articulation, for partial narratives, counter-narratives and non-narratives, for the clashing, the inharmonious, for the transgressed, for radical connectivism, and surely for “risky reading.”

Our 2nd outreach programme - The Factual, the Fictional, and the Fabulated: Shared Embodiment - embodies and is an embodiment itself of a possible and the imagined world-in-common. A world-in-common that opens the passageways and cross-overs of the intended and unintended fractures that make us shift from scientific research knowledge in the filmic and essayistic to the feminist indigenous knowledges, the splits that makes us take new paths and change the method of tracing.

Splits and passageways of shared embodiment, as active interventions on the fabric of society, the social, political, the cultural, and the corporeal.