Bodies of Water – Interactive tour through Liquid Archives with Julia Binter and guests

Water flows through our bodies and across the planet. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water; before birth, we develop surrounded by amniotic fluid. Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface. We are, in Astrida Neimanis’ words, bodies of water – connected through water to other bodies, places, histories, and environments. Yet these watery relations are far from equal: access to water is increasingly precarious, shaped by climate change, drought, pollution, and profound inequalities.

In Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s exhibition Liquid Archives, the ocean becomes a protagonist: a body of water that carries histories of colonial exploitation, displacement, and the transoceanic trafficking of human beings, but also a space of memory, connection, and healing.

What changes when we understand ourselves as bodies of water – porous, interconnected, and entangled with other bodies, histories, and environments?

Inspired by Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), this interactive tour brings her thinking into dialogue with Togo-Brisby’s works From Bones and Bellies (2021) and Mother Tongue (2020). Together, we explore water as archive, memory, relation, and a condition of life itself.

Organised in cooperation with the Body History Working Group of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.

The interactive tour is part of the exhibition “Knowing Plants—Ecologies of Memory and Practices.”