Wet-Togetherness on the e-flux podcast

The 13th Shanghai Biennale releases three new episodes of the Wet-Togetherness series, which includes sound pieces commissioned by the Biennale from artists and scholars: Vera Frenkel, Ibiye Camp, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, Elise Hunchuck, Tabita Rezaire and Yin Aiwen.

These three episodes are titled Clogging, Discharging, Lubricating.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 7: Clogging. With two independent sound pieces by artists Vera Frenkel and Ibiye Camp
Material power resides in the containment and control of flows. Far from avoiding friction, it is precisely the disruptions and systemic imbalances in flow itself that keeps the system running and allows for uneven forms of distribution, accumulation, and advantage. Latency, clogging, inertia, and slowness are instruments to both enact and challenge power.

When artist Vera Frenkel was working on A Challenging Word and a Prescient Work, her sound piece, she heard the unexpected news that a neighbourhood “developer” was demanding that her city cancel its heritage by-law in order to give space for redevelopment, threatening to force her out of her home and studio. Under these painful circumstances, Frenkel wrote a letter to Andrés Jaque, in which she reflected on how neoliberal approaches to hydrocommons, such as Toronto’s coastal line, have manifested polarized economic, social, and political divides. Since the 1980s, and accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism operates through the redevelopment of cities’ waterfronts, disarticulating through violence the social, architectural, ecological, and productive practices and associations that historically grew there. These waterfronts become sites for money placement, tax evasion, and capital laundering. Citizens who live in these areas encounter segregation, victimhood, and vulnerability. Frenkel’s monumental work ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive traces the grief that late neoliberalism and architectural complicity produce in citizens dispossessed of visual and physical access to water. In this related sound piece, Frenkel ultimately reflects on how an economic system that claims universal dynamization operates, in fact, by dispossessing citizens of their mobility and communal relationships.

Ibiye Camp uses Injiri fabric to reflect on how automation forcefully transforms our bodies. Injiri has its origins in another fabric, the Madras, which circulated through the world during the transatlantic slave trade. In Buguma, Nigeria, where part of Ibiye’s family is from, Kalabari craftwomen recondition and re-imagine the cloth by cutting and removing threads to reveal new patterns. The resulting Injiri fabric is worn as wrappers in Kalabari ceremonies. In recent years, the pulled cloth is no longer made by Kalabari women, but by factory machines in China. The female creative position has been displaced by machines, triggering a shift in social roles and spaces in Buguma. In Ibiye’s piece we hear the sound of Kalabari drums communicating stories of goddesses, gods, and spiritual beings. We also hear the traces and ghostly presences resulting from this transformation in the manufacturing process.

Episode 8: Discharging. With a sound piece by researchers and designers Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck (in collaboration)
Rainmaking is a long-lasting human dream. Triggering water precipitation in air to combat water scarcity, drought, and global warming has driven spiritual cultural practices, scientific studies, and territorial conflicts. It has materialized in countless ceremonies, rituals, and other technologically enabled practices. Human ambition to tame the environment drives the proliferation of contemporary cloud seeding programs, which speaks about the political, ecological, and social consequences of the extraction of what is common.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck talk about Sky River, a project supported by the Chinese government to work on the watershed of the Huang He (Yellow River) through weather engineering and aimed at mitigating the territory’s increasing drought conditions. Articulating a new planetary and atmospheric imaginary, Sky River positions the water that circulates in the upper atmosphere not as a natural occurrence but as an asset that can be secured through infrastructure. Precipitation is, in this context, a readily available water source that could be managed through a distributed network of cloud-seeding devices, while the tracking of weather patterns can be done via sophisticated remote-sensing technologies.

Episode 9: Lubricating. With two independent sound pieces by artists Tabita Rezaire and Yin Aiwen
Smoothness drives contemporary technological regimes: frictionless experiences, immediate gratifications, a promise of a world of flows without disruption. We are enchanted by a slippery seamlessness, mediated by sleek surfaces. A visual order accommodating the idea that the world, and capital, run painlessly. An order enabling control over collective imaginations, bodies, and natural resources. One that oils the relentless infrastructural libido.

Tabita Rezaire sends her blessings and wishes for a New Moon day. A new life cycle. An opportunity to create anew. A time for identity seeking and becoming a seeker of the depths of existence. The New Moon meddles to remind us that the possibilities for change are infinite.

Aiwen Yin is member of the ReUnion Network collective, a group of people operating from different modes of engagement to both promote and speculate with non-familiar forms of kinship. In Yin’s words, support, mutual care, grief, healing, and affection are not exclusively allocated among blood-related beings, but instead become a fundamental feature of human associability and of social-making at large. Aligned with ReUnion Network’s engagement with the daily formation of social bonding, Aiwen Yin imagines her practice as providing a frame where non-normative forms of inclusivity can be nurtured.

Previous episodes

Episode 1: Menstruating. With a sound piece by artist Cecilia Vicuña

Episode 2: Decomposing. With two independent sound pieces by artists Tuo Wang, and Daisy Bisenieks and Royce Ng (Zheng Mahler)

Episode 3: Flushing. With two independent sound pieces by artists Hao Pei Chu and Liam Young

Episode 4: Breathing. With two independent sound pieces by artists Torkwase Dyson and Itziar Okariz

Episode 5: Melting. With two independent sound pieces by the artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun (in collaboration) and Michael Wang

Episode 6: Transfusing. With three independent sound pieces by scholar Iván L. Munuera and artists P. Staff and Himali Singh Soin