Contemporânea

Liquid Worldings is a series of talks that engage with water, attuning to its material agencies, storied flows, and political entanglements through feminist posthumanist and material ecocritical lenses. The series seeks to open spaces for dialogue around the Blue Humanities, considering water as expressive matter—an elemental force that shapes histories, struggles, and imaginaries. These exchanges invite us to world-with water: to become-with its currents through embodied, multispecies storytelling practices that unsettle the boundaries between matter and meaning. Throughout the series, we engage with African feminist aquapoetics, Indigenous Latin American hydro-activism and hydropoetics, and the liquid politics of sound as a mode of inquiry. These conversations reflect on how art, literature, and situated listening practices can offer transformative ways of sensing, knowing, and relating to water—enacting alternative imaginaries of care, regeneration, and resistance.

Polo Moji engages with African feminist aquapoetics through the lens of “liquid feminism,” a concept she develops to think through gendered geographies and spatial dislocations in the wake of slavery and colonialism. Her talk draws on literary texts by Nnedi Okorafor, Mia Arderne, and Fatou Diome to consider how speculative and magical realist narratives imagine water as a site of intersecting histories and contested mobilities. Through figures such as Mami Wata and motifs like the Atlantic as a belly, Moji explores how these works articulate feminist engagements with space, memory, and the oceanic aftermath of empire.

Liquid Worldings proposes a practice of attentive listening to the narrative ecologies of water, where artistic and speculative practices become modes of world-making, of regenerating and transforming relations between bodies, territories, and liquid materialities, calling forth gestures of resistance, insurgent care, and radical reimagination.

— Salomé Lopes Coelho, Curator