Wet Dreams

Wet Dreams addresses water beyond its mere conception as a resource, exploring its role as a catalyst in eco-social relations. The exhibition celebrates practices that mobilise fluid matters for creating bonds of solidarity, embodiment, and desire.

The works of contributing artists delve into healing, toxic, and residual waters, as well as into bodily fluids. They invite engagement with rain, rivers, reservoirs, and muds. They summon the sewers, the valves regulating flows, and conduits hidden within walls, basements, and ceilings. They invoke the world of hoses and pipes, and the orifices that allow entry to the liquids soaking our worlds, as well as the leaks, drips, and occasional overflows of the repressed.

The exhibition is organized around the following themes:

Emanations and Soakings: On ritual architectures surrounding medicinal, mineral-rich waters that spring from the earth’s depths, connecting bodies with the planet’s body.

Rain and Other Discharges: On the design of formulas, ancestral rituals, and technologies for weather modification to invoke rain and enhance the fertility of the land.

Overflows of the Repressed: On actions to liberate water bodies and dismantle the controlling, anthropocentric ambitions of modern infrastructure projects.

Orifices and Shared Fluids: On the use of bodily secretions as design materials for spaces and devices dedicated to hygiene, erotic impulses, sexual transactions, and human and more-than-human care.

Pressure Valves and Overflowing Pipes: On how usually hidden elements such as pipes and valves are an essential part of the architectures of the liquid, aqueous, and climatic.

Leaks and Hedonistic Waste: On design practices related to the residual, the toxic, and the stinky, resulting in new material vibrations, sensations, and spaces of enjoyment.

Sensorial Prosthesis: On devices that connect bodies to multi-scalar climatic processes.

Wet Dreams navigates the longings and anxieties around liquid scarcity and abundance through decolonial, queer, and hydrofeminist approaches. The exhibition, curated by Marina Otero Verzier, is the result of a collaboration between CentroCentro and MAYRIT, the Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture. Wet Dreams also serves as the overarching theme for MAYRIT 2024, conceived by Otero Verzier. The exhibition continues the research developed for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, directed by Andrés Jaque with a curatorial team that includes You Mi, Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, and Filipa Ramos.

​Exhibition brochure.

Coordination and Production: CentroCentro.

Participants: Yi-Fei Chen, Matilde Cassani, Elsa Casanova Sampé, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Patricia Coelho, elii [oficina de arquitectura], Mariam Elnozahy, Pol Esteve Castelló, Marco Ferrari, Ignacio G. Galán, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, María Jerez, La Cuarta Piel, Elena López Riera, Miguel Montoya, Ivan L. Munuera, Marc Navarro Fornós, Claudia Paredes, Philippe Rahm, Joel Sanders, Jan Christian Schulz, Rebecca Schedler, Ariadna Silva Fernández, Ana Robles Pérez, Serina Tarkhanian, Susan Schuppli.

Curatorial assistance: Ana Robles Pérez / Exhibition design: Pablo Ferreira Navone / Visual identity: Víctor Clemente / Graphic design: Víctor Clemente, Simón Sepúlveda, Julio de Pablo / With support from: Creative Industries Fund NL and Fundación María José Jove.

MAYRIT is a global, biennial platform that showcases young and experimental creators working in contemporary design and architecture. Founded by Miguel Leiro, who directs the platform along with curatorial director Joel Blanco, MAYRIT has been held in Madrid since 2020 to spark critical dialogue around the ecological and social impact of contemporary design practices. For the 2024 edition, the biennial has assembled a team of guest curators, including Grandeza Studio, Cecilia Tham of Futurity Systems, and Hyperstudio responding to Wet Dreams, the conceptual framework formulated by Otero Verzier. Last edition’s theme, The Drowned World(s), was developed by the Institute for Postnatural Studies.

MAYRIT 2024 opening week will take place from May 22–28.