Surface Water, Public Spaces, and Speculative Monuments: Rituals and Communal Narratives

Academic summary

Practising Water: of rituals and engagements studies the chronicles of Water, Spirituality, and the symbiotic relationships they devise as mode of communication and language. This encompasses the surrounding nature, including the human as an inevitable entity when discussing relations between water and spirituality. My research aims to identify and understand agencies' vocabulary in creating narratives that look into the water beyond its physical use and anthropogenic manifestations. It navigates relationships through the everyday accounts of habitats living off, by, with, or in surface water. This immersion seeks to understand how indigeneity engages water believed to have spiritual significance and how this relationality forges communication to accumulate epistemology while challenging epistemisde.

In this project, “water” specifically refers to surface water that flows within particular time-places. I do not intend to address water in its universal sense. Therefore, the pluriversality of water should be engaged from a localized perspective, particularly from an indigenous relatability. Hence, I departed from water close to my formation, the source point of the Blue Nile in the Gojam region, Ethiopia.The epistemologies of a locality can challenge the pre-established concepts of epistemicide. This is evident in Walter Mignolo's decolonial theory, which thoroughly investigates pluriversality for an epistemic shift. He challenges epistemicide regarding knowledge structures molded by situated theories rather than academia, which sits in a position of authority and norm.

The following initial questions guide the research and artistic works: What does it mean when one claims to listen to the water or speak with water? What relevant vocabulary emerges when looking at various cultures and their relationship to bodies of water? What does this vocabulary reveal about the cultures I observe, the status of the body of water in question, and my position as observer, researcher, and artist? In my human desire for kinship with the earth and others, how can the spiritual, as an unearthly phenomenon, be situated? As the project progresses and brings forth critical questions alongside pre-formulated ones; researching, analyzing, and adopting forms of secrecy, care, fear and intensity require by spiritual relatedness become instrumental for both methods and findings. By adopting and initiating rituals and engagements across artistic instances, the project establishes a space for learning and knowing.