Water

The Goose, 2015

Thinking With Water, 2013

KLIMA #5: Liquid Futures, 2022

When Klima first reached out to Qanat, to invite the collective to contribute to the issue you’re currently reading, I spent some time thinking what new forms of collaborative writing we could propose. I had just found, in my archives, a first draft for a zine that was never brought to completion; a proposal for a small publication I had started assembling in 2017, following up the emergence of Qanat’s very first iteration. Back then the project took the shape of a residency followed by an exhibition, which was nourished, in parallel, by a public program hosted by the cultural space Le 18 in Marrakech which involved artists, architects, geographers, ethnobotanists, and activists, all of whom came from or were committed to various Moroccan watery landscapes. This manuscript that had sat in my laptop for more than five years was like an early manifestation of an instance of a project, uttered without any presupposition that it could become what it is today: a collective body of contributors, a rhizome of various inquiry lines, an infrastructure of like-minded people thinking from and operating not only in Marrakech, but increasingly within other geographies. Yet, when browsing through it, I realized how many seeds of the current conversations and names of long-lasting contributors that first project already contained. And so I thought: why not offer a glimpse of that first space-time? Why not exhume a Qanat before Qanat, an early project which opened up many more questions, as well as unfolding friendships, complicities, shared understandings, and collective possibilities? What you will navigate through in the following pages is a summarized version of a collection of texts and conversations I had, primarily, with the seven artists invited to contribute to the first Qanat exhibition Between Wells as part of the broader program Qanat: on the Politics and Poetics of Water, namely Oli Bonzanigo, M’barek Bouhchichi, Abdellah Hassak, Jérôme Giller, Shayma Nader & Nadir Bouhmouch, and Heidi Vogels.

How can we begin to think with water and like the watery bodies we are? This challenge is posed by the writers, artists and researchers whose works are collected in Thinking with Water. The book stages a necessary intervention in cultural and political thought, exploring the premise that water can provide not an abstract model for, but a material example of, a relational ethics attentive to the co-constitutive and interdependent nature of the human and the more-than-human. The resulting collection is a richly interconnected, interdisciplinary account of how diverse human cultures have valued and devalued, and lived with and against, the bodies of water that surround, course through and sustain them.

The recent upsurge in research on the political, social and aesthetic life of water no doubt owes its impetus to maritime, climate change, Anthropocene and feminist studies (Steinberg and Peters, Neimanis, deLoughrey, Blum, Chen and others). Critics have looked into the environmental, (post)colonial, geographic, political and cultural significance and use of water across some very specific contexts (e.g. the Arctic, the Indian Ocean, film, literature, capitalism, water management, urban spaces, maritime crossings), engaging both its reality and representation. The former has been addressed by, among others, Hawkins et al., Anand, Neimanis and Helmreich. The latter has drawn critics such as Yates, Anidjar, Cohen, Mentz, Neimanis and Protevi, to name just a few. Philosophical discourses, on the other hand, have drawn on what water resists, enables and connotes and the values thus generated: its mobile and liquid and life-giving nature. Gaston Bachelard probes into the imaginary textures of matter via literary representations of water. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have resorted to the physical properties of water to theorize what they call the smooth space. Michel Serres focuses on the acoustic life of the sea to talk about noise as the other of order and regulation. For (Freud's) psychoanalysis, the oceanic is "the unconscious of the unconscious" (Rooney). A very recent special issue of ELN inaugurates hydro-criticism, a term which marks novel interventions in the field of maritime studies and beyond. This special issue aims to further expand the existing research on the material, political and affective states of water as well as to enable novel waves and ways of thinking with and through water. Moving beyond the somewhat over-researched concepts of fluidity and flows, we aim to shift critical inquiry towards perspectives that balance between the scientific, the social, the (bio-)political and the cultural. We particularly welcome theorizations that foreground water's material constitution (with its singular physico-chemical properties) as well as its relational potential, such as its interactions with substances, forces, bodies and shapes, as well as with itself. We are particularly interested in (the consequences of):  water's ability to wet,

Jane Montague, Irene Runayker and Solveigh Goett are visual artists and friends who live by the sea, close to a river, and share an affinity to water that resonates in their work in different ways. In this piece they reflect, in words and images, on their affective relationship to water and personal experiences that have shaped their way of seeing. There are themes running along the movement of the water as rivers turn into sea, recurring sightings of shipwrecks and mermaids, and musings concerning the many what ifs that flow through memory into imagined futures.

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?"

Lwati: a journal of contemporary research, 2015

Imagery's centrality to the literary artist's creative enterprise has always been emphasized by critics and literary theorists alike. Scholars have observed that literature as an art has its root and effectiveness in the imaginative capability of its creators. Thus, when we praise a literary work as good, we are invariably alluding to the effectiveness and beauty of its network of images. However, every writer has his own peculiar stock of imagery developed either by the peculiarity of his experience or by mere fancy; and each time he crafts a literary work, these images come into play. For J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, water imagery is an instance of such peculiar stock, which is obviously attributable to his experience in water affairs as a home-grown Ijaw man. Just as it is with all ingenious handlers of imagery, water imagery in the hands of Clark- Bekederemo is always skilfully deployed to the development of the component parts of his literary works. This essay, therefore, tr...