liquid archivesliquid futures
Liquid Archives Liquid Futures: Representing the Climate in Transition Times explores new approaches to representing climate change and climate justice in contemporary art.
Water is becoming an ever more important medium of concern on a global level—with sea level rise, changing storm patterns, melting polar regions, pollution, drought, weather engineering projects, and ocean mining and more. Increasingly, these transformations have been represented through a dominant lens of climate disaster: Water is to be feared. Water is destructive. To disrupt this framework, Liquid Archives Liquid Futures offers a selection of recent globally-oriented, but locally-immersed, art and design practices that embrace water's capacity as medium. These practices do not deny that radical life-threatening changes are happening in the hydrosphere, but they instead make us aware of water’s own archiving and futuring capabilities. It has been used as medium to screen and even absorb the destructive nature of human-to-human relations, and now it must be embraced as the ur-medium of imaginative resistance and interrelation. The book argues that art’s best contribution to climate change discussions is to move beyond climate “visualization” and “communication” to embrace embodied immersion, elemental exploration, philosophical reflection, engaged storytelling and community action in order to learn how water can re-orient us towards alternative futures. Art’s immersive modes create the necessary re-connections of thinking, seeing, encountering, and habituating now needed in these transition times. |