We Are All at Sea: Practice, Ethics, and Poetics of “Hydrocommons” Astrida Neimanis, RIBOCA2—2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020
RIBOCA2, the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, titled and suddenly it all blossoms and curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, looks to re-enchantment as a frame for building desirable futures—reimagining ways of being human in a context of deep ecological, economic, and social mutation. Against cynicism and political despair, transforming fear into possibility and peril into exuberance, the biennial seeks alternative actions, thoughts, and narratives for alternative futures.
SOFIA LEMOS: Throughout the history of navigation, our experience of time has never been an accurate affair. Clocks would lag and lose their minutes to magnetic forces; tides would change the perception of when, where, and how deep one was; timepieces and navigational instruments mapped how to make time, and how to ship it from place to place. In this deeply narrative time, a continuous, finite, and stable time scale was used to map much of the world and divide it into borders. From oil spills to sewage discharges to microplastics and the by-products of industrial and agricultural processes washing up in coastal waters, from deep-sea mining and fracking to illegal overfishing and rising temperatures that threaten the ocean’s chemistry and biodiversity, our marine ecosystems are rapidly changing, and so do our bodies in relation to them.
In the following conversation, Astrida Neimanis—feminist scholar and environmental humanities thinker, and currently a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney—suggests a we that has a common history in our watery beginnings, although we are not all equally adrift. Neimanis proposes a framework for negotiating these relations: a practice, ethics, and poetics of “hydrocommons” that also acts as a framework for rethinking environmental justice claims that support more thoughtful and just relations with more-than-human worlds.
ASTRIDA NEIMANIS: I would like to begin with a quote:
We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition. As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation. The space between ourselves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin—the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling through us, just pausing as this bodily thing we call mine. Water is between bodies, and of bodies, before us and beyond us, but also very presently this body, too. Our comfortable categories of thought begin to dissolve. Water entangles our bodies in relations of gift, debt, theft, complicity, difference, and relation.1
I wrote these words about a decade ago. They comprise the opening section of a short experimental essay titled “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” My proposal was simple: that understanding our own human bodies—these sacks of blood, guts, and bone that is mostly made of water—as bodies of water connected to, coming from, and flowing into other more-than-human bodies of water, would place us in a different kind of relation to other bodies of water.
We imagine ourselves distributed and connected across space: human bodies ingest reservoir bodies, while reservoir bodies are slaked by rain bodies, rain bodies fall into ocean bodies, ocean bodies aspirate fish bodies, fish bodies are consumed by whale bodies—which eventually pass on, and sink to the seafloor as marine snow, a kind of weather underwater, to rot and be swallowed up again by the ocean’s dark belly.2
This different kind of hydrological cycle insists that we relinquish any lingering illusion of nature as separate from culture, or of humans as separate from the world around us.
These relations also extend through deep time, and connect us to all the strange bodies of water that flow into us across epochs and generations.
As Charles Darwin once quipped: “Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite!”3 Darwin’s “pleasant genealogy” reminds us of our evolutionary fishy beginnings whereby all terrestrial life came from the sea, folding that marine habitat inside of itself as it learned to stand on its own two feet. The story also reminds us that all watery bodies are “carrier bags,” to use feminist sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s term.4 She suggested that the first tool that humans took up was not a sharp pointy weapon but rather a carrier bag: a net, a basket, a bottle, a sling.
Astrida Neimanis is a writer, a teacher, and currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute. She coedited (with Cecilia Chen and Janine MacLeod) of Thinking with Water (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) and authored Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). Her work primarily investigates water as a site of damage, desire, fear, and fecundity, and as an idea and imaginary, but also as an environment and embodied place. She draws inspiration from close readings of philosophers, writers, artists, and waters themselves, for a plural view of feminism that is intersectional, antiracist, and devoted to acknowledging the importance of queer and anticolonial theory to contemporary environmental thought.
