Common Waters

Contributors: Paola Pietronave

Waters are a commons. They are also a common matter and topic, widely and variously discussed in different fields and with different perspectives, aims and methodologies. This room is a space for their many forms, declinations and aspects.

Waters have been widely studied, explored, exploited and investigated in what we might envision as an archipelagic form of knowledge. The room, coordinated and curated by Paola Pietronave and Arianna Sollazzo, aims to gather the many practitioners, cultural workers, thinkers, artists, researchers who – from similar and/or different fields and perspectives – are “learning with water*”. It is conceived as a rhizomatic and horizontal structure, following these archipelagic forms of knowledge. Islands-nodes-cracks will gather approaches focusing on interests, imaginaries and needs and connect through a perpetual wavy movement among them. The room will follow these fluctuations encouraging the sharing of resources, methodologies and perspectives, concerns, questions, desires, practices…

* “We are living in a watershed moment in which we not only need to learn about water, but we need to learn with water”, from Dorothy Christian, Rita Wong, Downstream: Reimagining Water, WLU Press, Waterloo, Ontario, 2017.