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.
The series opens with Azucena Castro, who invites us to explore hydropoetic expressions from the Lafken Mapu—the coastal territory inhabited by the Mapuche people—as forms of water activism in the face of environmental destruction caused by extractivist policies in Chile. Castro’s presentation focuses on Roxana Miranda Rupailaf’s ethno-hydrological poem Shumpall, examined both as a written text and a video poem, alongside the video-mapping work of the Delight Lab collective. These works foreground embodied, place-based strategies of resistance, where water is not treated as a resource for profit but as a vital force intertwined with territorial and collective survival.
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