Performing Water in the Arts – HYDROARTS

The Performing Water in the Arts project focuses on the recent rise in performative instances of artistic productions that acknowledge water as a creative partner (underwater sculptures, aquatic dance, site-specific theater, multi-sensory installations, etc). These practices are then cross analyzed with conceptual theories that use the terminology of fluidity and other aquatic properties (Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernities, Donna Haraway's sympoiesis, Astrida Neimanis' hydrofeminism, Karen Barad's agential realism, Joanna Zylinska's hydromedia, Rinaldo Walcott’s black aquatic, etc.), examining the simultaneous transfers of theory and artistic practice across French and Anglo-Saxon cultures over the past thirty years. Composed of an online research platform, a webinar series, creative workshops, a pedagogical resource platform, water art festivals and publications, the project is designed to bring together academics and artists from multiple fields to engage in creative experiments around the performativity of water. By limiting the study to artistic engagements that attribute an active role to water, whether via submersion, convergence, or immersion, the project examines how the materiality of water exerts an active and dramaturgical force in the process of sense construction. The project's goal is to show how water can serve as an artistic partner and conceptual model in cultivating the aesthetics of a possible ecological ethics.