This is Water

^{type - installation, 2017}

^{institute - Studio for Immediate Spaces}

^{Location - Sandberg Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (NL)}

‘This is Water’ attempts to evoke a ^{liquid spatial experience} that interprets the transient and barren objectivity of the art academy in a material and symbolic manner. Composed of elemental shapes of fog harvesting meshes, it creates a space of ambiguous transitions in terms of light, hue, humidity and motion as the wind blows through the hanging lattices, turning the air into water. Literally generating its own reflection – embodying the ^{narcissistic aesthetics} we now refuse in art but demand from design–, ‘This is Water’ encourages a debate around the utopian expectations about its own material and the limits of art, design and architecture.


The water lab has been choreographed with the interplay of two spatial situations. Manifesting the inauguration of the ^{fictional economical model of water sharing}, the attendees are asked to sit down for a moment and take out a test, confronting their power imbalance over resources over the Liquidity desk. In the indoor glass pavilion of the building I have created a Biotope for my researched material staged in a rooftop scenario, to expose it to the changing environmental circumstances (like wind, temperature and humidity) and let it react on.


‘This is Water’ is the titular parable of David Foster Wallace’s over-quoted speech to graduating students. The speech is praised and despised for embodying the push against postmodern irony, in the name of a New Sincerity. It leads from how it dawns on the young fish that they live in a real context – water – to ‘the real value of education’, the freedom over one’s thoughts in and outside academia, in the mundane world.

Contemporary art activism is the heir of [...] two contradictory traditions of aestheticization,’ Groys argues. ‘On the one hand, art activism politicises art, uses art as political design—that is, as a tool in the political struggles of our time [...] But art activism cannot escape a much more radical, revolutionary tradition of the aestheticization of politics—the acceptance of one’s own failure, understood as a premonition and prefiguration of the coming failure of the status quo in its totality, leaving no room for its possible improvement or correction. The fact that contemporary art activism is caught in this contradiction is a good thing. [...O]nly self-contradictory practices are true in a deeper sense of the word.’


^{Drip. Drip. Drip.}

Generating its own fleeting, narcissistic reflection, This is Water constantly negates and reproduces its own symbolic and material substance, encouraging a debate about the limits of art, design and architecture.