Liquid Worldings. Feminist and Ecomaterial Imaginaries of Water
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.
Margarida Mendes introduces sound as an investigative medium capable of tracing environmental transformation across watery landscapes. Drawing from fieldwork along the Mississippi and Tejo rivers, she discusses how sonic practices can register ecological change while reshaping our relationship with geologic time. Mendes invites us to consider the methodological and political dimensions of listening in environmental research, highlighting sound’s potential to attune us to the complexity and volatility of aquatic systems in a weathering world.
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