Conference presentation of artistic practice

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The watery intimacies focus on the exploration of bodies of water both materially and semiotically, as a liquid state of belonging, a place of the encounter between different bodies, the inside and outside in a watery milieu. Bodies of water, the term used by Neimanis (2017) considers a human body as a watery organism, or watery matter in creation, a place where inside and outside meet, in constant watery circulation. The research paper draws on the feminist posthuman understanding of the human becoming a non human through affective modes of living (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). Acts of pouring, steaming, sweating, salty tears, swimming, and diving are seen as an affective interface, as watery environments where the inside meets the outside of the bodies. 

This practice-based research examines the intimacy of bodies of water when dissolving the sense of self in connection with the other watery environment, exploring the embodied liquid epistemology in the making. Additionally, this research is interested in speculating how the act of watery research holds the potential in attuning to the state of being the body of water, in the intimacy of becoming and belonging to an(other), inside and outside of different watery milieus. 

Building on Astrida’s understanding of embodiment through the process of worlding happening every day in the watery environment, this approach proposes the act of intimacy in the process of being the liquid, in moving, swimming, diving, sensing, researching, being the body of water in the making. This process demonstrates how our bodies of water are already more than human as part of an ongoing worlding in the watery milieu. Additionally, such understandings allow us to reflect on practice-based methodologies as valuable in shaping the research methodologies in arts and humanities, as corporeal, affective and relational with the material world. 

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