Conversations between water

Conversation 1

Audio: Salton Sea, California, USA

Video: Bay of Naples, Mediterranean Sea, Italy

Conversations between water is an immersive video and audio installation designed to create somatic resonance between bodies - bodies of water and our own aqueous bodies. A rhythmic light code transgresses boundaries, propagating across membranes, can we feel it in the waters of our own bodies? Can those waters “talk” with other waters?

Recent studies suggest that the neurons in our wet brains use light to communicate and repair, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that brains operate in almost total darkness. We are light-sensitive beings, with photo-sensitive cells found distributed throughout the body, even in the darkest of internal spaces.

Conversations between water is an attempt to access and instantiate another kind of language, one which transcends locations, species and time. A deep code of consciousness and a reminder that we are borrowed from, and belong to, the wilderness.

Infants routinely outsource cognitive processes that are beyond their capacities to their carers, in this way the singular brain in isolation is an illusion - we inhabit a dispersed, social and interdependent affective and cognitive system. What happens if we expand our understanding of this dispersed cognition to include and embrace the non-human, what would it mean to think and feel with water, what would it mean for water to think and feel for us?

Installed for the 2024 Bombay Beach Biennale, at the shores of the Salton Sea, Conversations between water created an aqueous environment in a space where the sea once was. A site specific memory and a dream of continuity, a reminder of the fundamental interconnectedness of all bodies of water, and of all life on earth. 

Projected onto a repurposed shipping container, the site of the new Bombay Beach Museum 2024. The  conversation unfolds…