Talk by Astrida Neimanis: "How to think (as) a body of water: Access! Amplify! Describe!" (english)

Описание: Talk by Astrida Neimanis: "How to think (as) a body of water: Access! Amplify! Describe!" (english language), Dortmunder Kunstverein, 06 October 2022
~ Special Program for "Wet Resistance“, 13.8.-30.10.2022, Dortmunder Kunstverein, with works by Hanna-Maria Hammari, Julian Irlinger, James Krone, Tetsumi Kudo, Darling Lopez-Salinas, José Montealegre, Berenice Olmedo, Anna Solal, Zoe Williams, curated by José Montealegre & Rebekka Seubert ~


Introductory words by Rebekka Seubert, artistic director of Dortmunder Kunstverein:
« We have invited Astrida Neimanis for this talk in order to connect their writing with some thoughts in this exhibition: The exhibition “Wet Resistance” is dealing with a doubt about an image of the human being in the digital era. As curators of this show, we feel that wet human bodies are increasingly seen as a problem in a perfectly functioning dry digital world. While the digital vocabulary has used water related terms like surfing or streaming, digital devices actually hate the wet, the humid, the mossy and the irrational, because it kills them, like a phone that falls into the ocean. Digital devices love the dry, the perfect handling, they like the order of the grid, the pixel, the numbered, the binary, well distinguishable, each thought in its box.
Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist and author of the book “Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology” (2017). Astrida writes about water, bodies, and weather from intersectional feminist perspectives, often in collaboration with artists, scientists, and communities. Their work uses interdisciplinary and practice-based methods to experiment in different ways of knowing and being. Astrida Neimanis is currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities and UBC Okanagan and also Director of the recently founded FEELed Lab: a collaborative and interdisciplinary environmental humanities field lab that is located on unceded Syilx territory in Kelowna, BC. In symposia, talks and workshops, through research and community engagement, the Lab is a place for thinking with and about environmental change from specifically feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, queer and crip perspectives. This commitment is based on what Astrida calls "hydrofeminist ethics".
What was inspiring to us in Astrida’s book while preparing this exhibition, was the fact that it basically grounds on a seemingly basic fact that all bodies are composed of around 75% of water, but that Astrida links this fact to other disciplines, e.g. to law, to then question the status of the individual as an entity: a wet human body always links to its surrounding world. »