Stories of Water. Chapter IV: Wounded and Healing Waters (2023)
Co-curator, ONCURATING Project Space, Zurich, Switzerland


Wounded and healing waters is the fourth chapter in “stories of water”, a project presenting a series of interventions exploring the multifaceted formal qualities of water, the complex symbiotic entanglements in which humans and water coexist, as well as the politics of water in a globalized reality. This final chapter in the series looks at the healing potentials of water, as well as its entangled relationship with environmental damage in the Anthropocene.
The works included in this chapter aim to reexamine our relationship with water; foregrounding our unquenchable extractivist inclinations towards the earth’s waters, as well as investigating the dichotomy of its at once harming and healing potential. In water’s role as the supporter of all forms of life; water can nourish, purify, soothe and flow through us – omnipresent in every aspect of earthly life. This precious resource is under constant threat by pollution and privatization, jeopardizing our most basic right to clean water. As Maude Barlow writes in her manifesto Water As Commons, “to feed the increasing demands of our consumer-based system, humans have seen nature as a great resource for our personal convenience and profit, not as a living ecosystem from which all life springs.”