Transforming Our Bodies of Water into Fluid Resistance Movements
Summary
109
Water
Fall 2023
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. 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. 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 articles refer to artworks that try to raise awareness about water pollution and climate issues, envisage a restorative justice, and offer new horizons of hope.
Cover: Hannah Rowan
Vessels of Touch, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, Milan
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Abstractions
Spring Summer 2025
Yet what about abstraction today? Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives, abstraction has gradually freed itself from the modernism yolk to recapture its evocative power. This issue proposes to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as a historical genre to consider its various plastic and semantic avenues. In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.