Transforming Our Bodies of Water into Fluid Resistance Movements

Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water. When “nature calls” some time later, we return to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, our chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace excretions, but also the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable culture, medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect.
— Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water”

Thirst unites us with the world and with others, vitally dramatizing all involved. It makes us physically experience what the victims of desertification and climate change feel. It makes us understand how this actual solidarity could extend into a solidarity initiative. 
— Jean-Philippe Pierron, La poétique de l’eau. Pour une nouvelle écologie

To achieve a true cosmopolitanism of water, we must first realize that rather than needing new concepts, we have a greater need to reimagine our ethical relationships to the environment.
— Sylvie Paquerot, Frédéric Julien, and Gabriel Blouin Genest, L’eau en commun. De ressource naturelle à chose cosmopolitique

We now face a global water crisis. Warning signs are flashing everywhere about the increased desertification of the Earth, the industrial pollution of water resources, and the over-
exploitation of aquifers. A UN report from 2021 indicates that by 2025 almost two thirds of the world’s population will face water shortages. Yet in Canada, water still flows freely down faucets and hoses without our fully realizing its scarcity. We don’t know what thirst is.¹ 1 - Most of us, I should say, since many Indigenous communities in Canada don’t always have access to running water.

The philosopher Jean-Philippe Pierron writes that “thirst unites us with the world and with others.”² 2 - Jean-Philippe Pierron, La poétique de l’eau. Pour une nouvelle écologie (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 2018), 83 (our translation). Ironically, and figuratively speaking, thirst is also the desire that has driven humans to extractive excesses. At a time when the UN is putting forward the notion of sustainability and the Québec government is encouraging businesses to develop sustainable development policies, multinational corporations everywhere are greenwashing and making the distinction between commercial transactions and actions that actually care about collective well-being particularly blurry. For example, the World Water Council, which organizes the World Water Forum, claims to focus “on the political dimensions of water security, adaptation and sustainability,” guided by the wonderful slogan “Together We Make Water a Global Priority.”³ 3 - World Water Council, accessed July 14, 2023, accessible online. Yet the activist Maude Barlow tells us in her book Whose Water Is It, Anyway?⁴ 4 - Maude Barlow, Whose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands (Toronto: ECW Press, 2019). that the World Water Council was formed in order to advance the interests of private companies offering services in water management. She also adds that the 2030 Water Resources Group, created by the World Bank Group to implement the UN’s sustainable development program, is composed of large bottler corporations such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo. Given that water started being traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in December 2020, we have ample reason to be confused (and concerned) about the real intentions concealed behind the notion of sustainable water resources management.

Thinking of water as a resource already subjects it to an economic rationale and an essentially anthropocentric vision. In the social and political sciences, researchers focusing on ecological considerations are developing new ways of thinking about water outside the purview of utilitarianism by first recognizing its vital role in the ecosystem. In L’eau en commun,⁵ 5 - Sylvie Paquerot, Frédéric Julien and Gabriel Blouin Genest, L’eau en commun. De ressource naturelle à chose cosmopolitique (Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012), 116 – 121 (our translation). the authors Sylvie Paquerot, Frédéric Julien, and Gabriel Blouin Genest offer a reconceptualization of “water” that takes into account its plural nature. Without denying the existence of water as resource, they suggest that it is important to restore it to its rightful place in our modes of governance, once we’ve recognized the vital aspect of water and its civic use. According to their typology, water as life source fulfills a necessity (protect the right to life and the survival of ecosystems), civic water meets needs (reasonable access to water), and water as resource satisfies desires (economic uses).

The water crisis is not limited to drinking water. The ecosystem of oceans, whose water contributes to the absorption of approximately 30 percent of CO2 emissions produced by human activities, is also jeopardized by global warming and melting glaciers. The seas and oceans have become the receptacles of our waste materials, decaying plastics, and oil spills. The eco-feminist Astrida Neimanis writes that they are the memory of our disposable culture: “Just as the deep oceans harbour particulate records of former geological eras, water retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would rather forget.”⁶ 6 - Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 98. Added to this memory that is already too heavy is the violent one of colonial history, closely linked to maritime traffic. The seas and oceans today continue to be sites of migration tragedies.

Faced with such a bleak portrait and the fact that environmental and humanitarian challenges are dependent on economic issues and interlinked policies, which are framed by complex laws, the influence of art is relatively modest. Nevertheless, alongside civic actions that we should actively do, artists can give back to water its symbolic and sacred value, preserved by many peoples around the world for whom water is not just a vital resource but also a spiritual figure.

Taking a poetical approach to water, the artists and theorists in this issue navigate between aesthetic forms, activist actions, and metaphor-rich analytical thinking. Adopting a resolutely critical perspective, the issue refers to artworks that try to raise awareness about water pollution and climate issues, envisage a restorative justice, and offer new horizons of hope. There is a willingness to think “in common” and “foreground our polymorphous connection with water” through the hydrofeminist perspective developed by Neimanis, according to whom “we are all bodies of water.” From encounters with aquatic ecosystems, we understand that water has agency and activates “its own magical resistance.” Therefore, to reimagine our ethical relationship to the environment and give back to water its fundamental role in a non-anthropocentric world, envisaging how we might transform our bodies of water into fluid resistance movements is a promising idea.

Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei