Public defence: Robel Temesgen Bizuayehu

Practising Water: of rituals and engagements

Practising Water: of rituals and engagements is an artistic research project that traces how spiritually animated bodies of water shape knowledge through ritual, story, and material encounter. The project begins at the spring-source of the Blue Nile (Abay) in Ethiopia, and later extends to a second water, the Glomma in Norway, not as a comparison, but as conditions for learning how to meet water without claiming it. Across these sites, I ask: what does it mean to engage water as a relational being rather than a resource, and how might such questions be approached through artistic practice, gestures, and rituals?

The research develops through listening as a method. Listening here is not only directed at water but practised as a research discipline: a way of attending to silence, hesitation, trust, and the limits of access. This method is shaped by an ethic of opacity. Certain stories, materials, and textual knowledges are approached through partiality rather than extraction, allowing what cannot be fully shared or fully known to remain generative.

The project moves cyclically between fieldwork and studio work. In the field, I conduct situated encounters through conversations, interviews, ritual attendance, and performative gestures, including sleeping in and beside contested waters. In the studio, these encounters are translated into material forms that hold rather than explain: goatskin parchment, handwoven cotton (gabbis), ink, pigment, and graphite become carriers of memory and relational responsibility.

The artistic outcomes include paintings, installations, performances, publications, and exhibitions. A key work is a 60-metre-long, 4.5-metre-high painting assembled from hundreds of stitched goatskin parchment sheets, accompanied by a continuous graphite “belt” of drawings that function as a glossary of offerings, tools, and ritual vocabularies. The project also includes a 78-metre parchment leporello made for a durational action at Glomma: a public act of depository and later retrieval, in which the book was laid into snow and river-edge conditions, then returned as torn, water-altered fragments.

Two Exhibitions, Eye of a Water – ዐይነ ውሃ (Nitja Center for Contemporary Art and Guttormsgaard Archive, 2025) presented the project across two locations, separating Blue Nile works from Glomma engagements to reflect uneven proximity and responsibility.
A central ethical outcome is an act of offering back: commissioning a hand-copied parchment replica of the Book of Enoch using traditional techniques, culminating in its donation through ceremonies in Bahir Dar and at Daga Estifanos Monastery (Lake Tana). This gesture positions artistic research as accountable practice: not only producing artworks, but sustaining relationships, materials, and living knowledges through time.

Ultimately, Practising Water proposes artistic research as a practice of relational attention: a way of knowing that emerges through gesture, repetition, withholding, and return.