6-channel audiovisual installation, 28’48’’
We glide in time, almost unaware of slipping into an extreme future that even a carefree entity such as water seems treacherous and malevolent. A force so powerful that it has helped electrify our mechanised world. Since ancient times, we have tried to harvest and contain it, but it has evaded us and taught us a lesson about frugality and poverty, moderation and access. I propose not to see water as a sinister entity ready to destroy or deprive life but rather to look at ourselves and ask: “How can we become water? How can we feel what it needs? Where does it want to flow? Who does it want to feed? How does it want to dance? I grew up in a house where once there was a mill, surrounded by a torrential stream. I can still smell the damp, stale air of the multilayered trauma of an early childhood soaked into conflicts, desires and primordial fear of the rising torrential water, thunder and lightning. I feel unpleasantly connected to the violent forces of natural occurrences and seek a delicate balance in our hydrosphere.
“Thus, we have to enter into its undulations to feel our bodies perform the geography of waves, the volume of water and the fragile connections between all that moves in its dark expanse.
— Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound (2019, 75)
The sound installation was developed at the Schaubmarov Mlyn in Pezinok of the Museum of National Art, Bratislava, Slovakia and commissioned by the Mela Festival of Experimental Music.
