water meditation for pool loop
workshop
at poolloop residency, cortém, PT

The workshop was focusing on creating an embodied experience in and with water. Through a guided meditation in the lagoon, we traveled through different states of water from our own bodies to the bodies of water around us, following the meanders of the aquatic circle. By perceiving ourselves as aquatic beings, by sharing thoughts about the state of the global waters, the gentle water of the lagoon touching our own bodies became a starting point for thinking about the ‘planetary hydrocommons’. In the second part of the workshop, the participants developed water organs. The process of building the instruments brought us an understanding of the mechanisms that can create sound through air and water pressure. We experimented with the encounter of these elements in the local lagoon and shared moments of listening, playing and contemplation.

Being in Water – as being ‘at sea’ – might become an abstract, but also material-based starting point to follow interspecies, ecologies, (his)tories of places and humans and more-than-humans. When we are departing from a non-familiar habitat such as water, we might feel something about our limits of perspective and perception. Water can hold, water can clean, water can save, water can destroy, water connects life and different forms of beings, water itself can become a lens to look through. How do we produce awareness but also knowledge and how do we pass it on? Since we are more used to creating knowledge in laboratory frameworks, I try to enrich my skills by learning from my senses and collective memories as aquatic beings as an addition to scientific methodologies. How can an aquatic environment liquefy and sensitize our solid habits of thinking? How can it teach us connection instead of separation by seeing ‘wetness everywhere’ instead of ‘water somewhere’?