Liquid Memories with paula roush

15 Jul

Liquid Memories

In the Liquid Memories workshop, participants experimented with the methodology of ‘wateryquery’; A methodology paula has been developing out of artistic research with water. Two words ‘water’ and ‘enquiry’ joined together form a new word that doesn’t feature in standard dictionaries and suggests a felt sense of enquiring with water. The method is a step by step guided exercise to help us figure our bodies of water, with a focusing moment of connection with the intricacy of our watery memories.

Working with personal photographic archives and local water samples, historical subjects appear as meteora, atmospheric phenomena like windy rain, clouds, misty vapour, and as watery places like rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, water stations, wet environments, inseparable from various human and non-human actors. They are chaotic, fragmented, messy, unruly, flow, fall, dissolve in multiple layers, with slippages, deep wells, knots, holes, underground tunnels, flooding, and contamination. Diffraction is the way waves of light or water overlap, producing inter-relational patterns of interference in flux. It is equally a tool used for a fluid form of knowledge-production, that inspired our diffraction apparatuses. Whilst ‘reflective remembering’ is more about an individual narrative that savors details and memorial signs, we relied on the material characteristics of water, their perpetual spiraling motion, to read Liquid Memories with the water’s surface tension, swirling vortices, pressure, and density, as seen in the chaotic sensitivity of water in constant motion.

Read more about liquid memories workshops and publication here.