The space between ourselves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin - the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling through us, pausing as the bodily thing we all call "mine." Water is between bodies, but of bodies, before us and beyond us, yet also very presently this body too.
Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water
Astrida Neimanis
The guiding principle of this work is the theoretical and poetic positioning of Astrida Neimanis that frames of our ancestral belonging to water.
Among mudlarking efforts alongside the Thames Estuary, trying to envision new imagined way of communicating and devices we will need to craft for our common future survival, her theory articulated for me an indispensable need for relationality between human and non-human ecosystems to counter the separateness of land and human bodies.
Evoking a visual post-anthropocentric milieu, this highly personal experience of the Thames Estuary intertwined human and elemental voices surfaced between writing and poetry, a performativity of languaging. Opening a quest for these relationships in formation between the intangible, the unconscious and the temporal.
Exploring new paths, where we, bodies of water, can recognise our elemental belonging, I came to acknowledge these spaces in formation, along the shore of this desert-like liminal spaces as spaces of possibility of the assembling of our new human consciousness.
Poetics of attunement, while engaging sensibilities, empathy and rituals, can inspire the multiplicity of our ecosystems, our umwelt.
It feels imperative to enable sites of resistance, to embrace our non-human agents, in the hope to shift from the rapid acceleration of climate shifts, sea level rise, mass extinction and societies of fear. Attunement to our vibrations, planetary frequencies and higher realms of being is perceived as mystic, sacred, ritualistic, immaterial, and not always equal to knowledge or science.
This connection is unconditionally necessary yet care and guidance to reconnect with purposeful spaces of attunement to experience and adjust to these fundamental planetary vibrations, is not widely accessible, and has been eradicated from our culture, traditions and knowledge. It is an obligation to contest and raise concern of outdated techno-scientific beliefs in the wake of new frontiers of studies embracing experiential multi-dimensionality of human nature that embraces into a future oriented Planetary Humanities. If we are to think across design and architecture, could we strive towards attunement when we plan, create and make?
I leave East India Dock behind me and I walk towards Trinity Buoy Wharf. I am feeling anxious, as most of the old buildings are being now replaced by cranes. On the front side of the lighthouse, a shack with its entrance pointing South. Its sides worn by the weather, peeling off paint. The door wide open. I find Michael Faraday’s hut. Old books and reference maps have been left orphan on the table and so did the collection of poems: ‘The rime to the ancient Mariner’. Celebrated here is Faraday whom spent many years experimenting in the lighthouse. I look further and I find also a table of elements and a letter to Lady Ada Lovelace, mathematician and first computer programmer. The sheer presence of the name Lovelace imprinted on paper, fast-forwards to uncover another giant.
Electric magnetism and machine algorithm invigorate the presence of the masculine and the feminine intertwining at the mouth of the river Lea. But also gets me thinking about the invisible landscape of waves and offshore pirate radio stations, which were broadcasted on sea forts and boats in the early days of radios, as Rachel Lichtenstein narrates in her book Estuary: Out from London to the Sea. Forthcoming was their genius and their spirit more than present. I feel I reached an intersection here, mentally and physically. The meeting of the water element with the air, the waves carrying saltwater and those that carry our messages. Both are deeply interconnected to our existence.
Trinity Buoy Warf is the site of London’s only lighthouse, resting at the confluence of the River Thames and the river Lea. It is believed at such confluence the nymphs and water spirits meet. Inside the lighthouse, the Longplayer, a once thousand year-long music composition created by Jem Finer with the Artangel, the space is resonating with 234 Tibetan singing bowls. this ancient instrument has been deeply important to me with its vibroacoustic energy. I place here a dedication, giving homage and thankfulness to this encounter. Intertwining