Performing Water in the Arts – HYDROARTS

The HydroArts project researches performative productions that invite water as a live element into the artistic process as part of a creative partnership. By limiting the study to artistic engagements that attribute an active role to water, creating works of art and performance that submerge, converge, or immerse the artwork or the spectator, the project examines how the materiality of water exerts an active and dramaturgical force in the process of sense construction.

Geographically, selected works will be limited to Francophone and Anglophone regions, while the time frame spans the past thirty years. This time frame coincides with the aquatic turn in the arts, the moment when the ecological art movement beginning in the 1960s, commonly referred to as “Land Art,” intersects with the popularization of the term “Anthropocene” in 2000 and the ensuing rupture with the assumption that nature can provide a stable background for artistic creation.

- Showcase, categorize & analyze representative samples of contemporary water art.

- Explore how artistic aquatic practices correspond to conceptual theories that rely on aquatic properties.

Progress Report to Date for the ANR “HydroArts” Project

Events Organized:

• Project kickoff workshop, May 15–16, 2025, University of Le Mans.

• HydroArts webinar series, March–April 2026 www.hydroarts.org/events/

Three exhibitions (May 2025, January 2026, May 2026) open to the public in collaboration with ENSIM and the Le Mans School of Fine Arts (TALM), featuring virtual reality creations, cymascopes, and immersive sound design experiences (art-science collaborations commissioned by HydroArts)

• Cymascope exhibition for the kickoff workshop, May 15–16, 2025

• “HydroArts” exhibition as part of Le Mans Sonore, Institute of Acoustics, January 17–18, 2026

• “The Well of Memories” exhibition, Institute of Acoustics, May 21, 2026

Collaborations with non-academic partners: Association Aquamour (in partnership with HydroArts; an art festival is co-organized with this association each year throughout the project’s three-year duration)

Performances or Art Installations: We attended the 38 performances, exhibitions, and festivals listed below, sometimes for multiple shows and over several days.

Surveys Conducted: We distributed hundreds of survey forms to audience members at 22 performances—some of which spanned multiple dates or productions—and collected over 300 responses. We also conducted street interviews to gather additional feedback.

Our sociologist partner has already conducted multiple analyses of our data, incorporating elements from interviews with artists and organizers.

Interviews Conducted : We conducted 21 video interviews with artistic directors, curators, and artists.

Digital Creations:

• Creation of a research platform (corpus currently under development linked to an interactive map)

• Facebook account

• YouTube account

• LinkedIn account

• Instagram account (92 followers)

• Facebook account

• Mailing list (97 subscribers)

• Webinar teaser

• Webinar videos

• Exhibition highlights

Publications:

- 2026, “A History of Hydrofeminism: Aquatic Transformations of Gender.” PhiloSOPHIA Vol. 16.1, SUNY Press.

- 2026, “Theater’s Aquatic Turn,” in *Theater and Social Action*, edited by Andrew Martinez. London: Bloomsbury.

HydroArts is launching a collaboration with Blue Humanities Journal, a newly launched journal that dedicates a creative section to publishing transcripts of our interviews.

Presentations: We have given 13 presentations introducing the project at symposia, conferences, and workshops.

Pedagogical Ressources: A second-year level Masters class was taught in tandem with the project, including student participation in the webinars with artists.

We continue to attend performances and view art installations, conduct interviews and audience surveys, and publish and share our work.

Our body of work is currently being developed and expanded.

We are continuing our series of webinars bringing together artists and researchers.

In September, we will begin creating video essays based on our interviews and collected documentation.

We are preparing an international conference for June 2027: HydroArts will host a conference from June 16 to 18, 2027, at the University of Le Mans. We are delighted to bring together inspiring researchers—both established and early-career—as well as our international team, to spend three days exploring the theme of water in artistic creation and the concepts it evokes.

A collective volume and a monograph are still in the works, in addition to the articles and chapters already scheduled for publication.

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.