Waterways: Arteries, rhythms and kinship is a three-day symposium that explores how water binds us across histories and futures. Meeting bodies of water in their insistent flow as joyful kin and as carriers of trauma, Waterways considers the politics and poetics of water through film screenings, listening sessions, performances, panels, and workshops. Thinking with streams, rivers, estuaries and oceans as more-than-human planetary networks, this symposium will bring together artistic perspectives on histories of empire and colonialism, kinship, spirituality, sovereignty, and Black and Indigenous futures.
Acknowledging Tate galleries’ locations by different bodies of water – Tate Modern and Britain’s location on the Thames, Tate St Ives on the Atlantic Ocean, and Tate Liverpool on the River Mersey – this symposium investigates the histories of colonialism, extraction and exploitation that these sites and others that were once colonial arteries still carry.
Attuning to and listening to tidal rhythms and the dynamism of bodies of water, we explore expressions of kinship, the subjectivities of water, marine and fluvial life and water ecosystems. We evoke water as a medium that facilitates spiritual communion and think with Ancestral practices, sacred waterscapes and water spirits. Often these sacred waterscapes are simultaneously sites of bordering, policing and militarisation, and increasingly spaces where the violence of the climate crisis, as a capitalist-colonial consequence, is felt. This symposium includes artistic contributions that explore questions of sovereignty and access to water, but also joy and leisure in how kinship with water is lived.
Waterways asks: How are ecological kinships with water held by artistic practices? How does attuning to bodies of water challenge ideas of boundaries and borders? And, what forms of more-than-human solidarity emerge in thinking with water?
This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.
