The exhibition Liquid Archives explores water not only as a natural element, but also as a form of sensitive memory, a female body, an ecological force, a fluid mythology, and a political material. We are all bodies of water, as Astrida Neimanis asserts; to think through water is to remember that we are never alone: to think with water is to recognize a radical interconnectedness. We are bodies of water and, as such, part of a collective, carriers of its memory.
Water is a living archive: it gathers, nourishes, cleanses, dissolves, transmits. Its movement carves, caresses, corrodes, polishes. It is origin, ruin, mother, tide. It preserves and reveals what the earth tends to forget. It is a universal receptacle. It traverses the territories of memory, dream, identity, and transformation. It is also a measure of our temporality. Yet this liquid time, shaped by deep ecological tensions, can prove fragile.
For the liquid archive is not merely a space for poetic or symbolic narration, but also a site of resistance: a memory of the living that evokes what we risk losing and calls out to be heard.
LIQUID ARCHIVES positions itself as a reflection on the mutability of water while at the same time fixing its primordial presence, as a witness to past time and to what is yet to come. The power and mystery of its depths retain, accompany, and conceal all at once. Depths, surfaces, and clouds—water and the human converge in all these myths, legends, sounds, and forms that nourish our collective imagination.
As an element of memory and preservation, in contrast to a land that can forget or conceal, seas, rivers, and lakes act as guardians of the memory of peoples. Water is akin to the unconscious and to the feminine, which hold emotions and deep memories that the rational mind—the earth—has repressed. A form of aquatic archaeology, close to the Foucauldian concept of the archive: the description of that extraordinarily vast and complex mass of things that have been said within a culture.
From this conceptual core, the exhibition opens onto the practices of the invited artists, whose works interpret the liquid as matter, metaphor, emotional element, vital force, source of nourishment, and existential condition. Their propositions function as interconnected currents—archives of fluidity in its multiple forms—where corporeality, memory, and science enter into dialogue.
Curated by Maddalena Pelù.
