Edg~ing waters: immersing with waters to reactivate senses of socio-ecological relation, recovery and resilience

Abstract

Edg~ing waters engages with waters as agential forces with the potential to reactivate senses of socio-ecological relation, recovery and resilience. This thesis responds to the question: how might immersing with waters through transdisciplinary artistic, curatorial and theoretical practices reactivate senses of socio-ecological relation, recovery and resilience? edg~ing waters immerses with waters in numerous metaphorical and material ways: the framework, and the vocabulary used in this text, are based around watery capacities as well as the littoral zone, while the practices of drinking, swimming and diving are engaged as modes of reconnecting with waters.

This research undulates across four ‘tidal currents’ – ebbs and flows – each one gestating a series of ‘immersions~’ and chapters (called tidepools). In the first ‘ebb,’ we encounter waters in their abstracted states with the purpose of attuning readers to the complexities of western-modernity’s bifurcated systems. Here, an argument for waters as multiple helps to reclaim them as agential and relational forces instead of universal resource. In the subsequent ‘flow,’ waters are communicated as seeping into our porous bodies, words and worlds. The focus circulates through micro and macro permeations to reveal how waters and societies are intermeshed in both personal and planetary contexts. A recovering of waters as socio-natural and political is illustrated through artistic and activist examples situated in ‘forgotten’ spaces – like international waters and intertidal zones. In the ensuing ‘ebb,’ waters, bodies, ecologies and societies are discussed as process; moving, negotiating, holding and coagulating to thicken western-modernity's thin representations of liminal sites through an embracing of ecotones and ecoclines. The tidepools within this tide detach from terrestrially-biased fixities and encourage a plunging into oceanic time-spaces to recover ‘hidden’ narratives, and potentially reactivate movements of resilience for living with the changing tides.

edg~ing waters intwines academic writing with creative responses in both written and visual forms. A series of journal entries and photographic explorations – reflecting on regular immersions with waters through swimming in the Baltic Sea – meander their way through the text along with the voices of theorists and anonymous, collective journal contributors. edg~ing waters moves to dislodge perceptions of waters as either ‘fixed’ or ‘fluid’ and to instead embrace them in their many, viscously transitory forms. This thesis engages with artists, writers, theorists and scientists to open up and reactivate ways to fathom modes of resilience attuned to this watery planet’s interconnected, yet indeterminate, cycles.