Liquid Grounds

Conceived as a declaration of love addressed to the German philosopher, the text is rich in exhortations, including the one that gives the exhibition its title: "Remember the liquid soil." In an attempt at a philosophical (re)conciliation of Nietzsche with water—an element whose absence in the work Irigaray highlights—and, by symbolic extension, with the feminine, the author invites him and us to remember our past as aquatic creatures, the essential state of "body of water" that humans and all living things on the planet share.

A term derived from the vocabulary of geology, designating any type of body of water—from the ocean to a lake, from a river to a puddle—"body of water" (or "water bodies") was transformed into a pivotal concept of the so-called "hydrofeminist" movement by theorist Astrida Neimanis in her 2019 essay "Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology." Here, Neimanis invites us to consider the human body as an inseparable element of the natural world and, through its own aqueous constitution, in continuity with all other living things.

This continuity between humans, living things, and water is particularly present in the works of Saodat Ismailova (1981-), an Uzbek artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of documentary and fiction. For Liquid Grounds, she presents the audiovisual installation Stains of Oxus, produced by Le Fresnoy in 2016.

The work chronicles the relationship between the Amu Darya River—one of the lifeblood of Central Asia, formerly known as the Oxus—and the communities who live along its banks. Flowing between Lake Bulunkul in Tajikistan and the Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan, the river is home to a morning ritual shared by the inhabitants of different villages, consisting of whispering their own dreams to the water. The river thus becomes not only a living archive of stories, identities, and collective resilience, but also, and above all, a true collective "body of water": revisiting their dreams and destinies, the people we encounter become one with Oxus.

For Liquid Grounds, Italian artist Elena Mazzi (1984-) presents a body of sculptures and a photographic installation, respectively titled Becoming and Unbecoming With (2018-2020) and Self-portrait with a whale backpack (2018). The works are born from the artist's personal experience, marked by a cliff diving accident that resulted in the rupture of several vertebrae, and a period of forced sedentary lifestyle. Feeling the need to create a new connection between her body and the seascape, Elena Mazzi undertook a long journey to Iceland, settling in a fjord.

The dialogue established between the two artists' pieces is that of two perspectives that are geographically (and geologically) distant, yet close in their shared, feminist way of speaking about the environment and humanity.

Thus, the ultimate objective of Liquid Grounds, both in the works and discourses it displays and deploys, and in its curatorial presuppositions, is to present a dual narrative of transformation and blending. Or, better put, of the liquefaction of the individual into the collective, of the body into space, of the self into the other-than-self.