Concept
Curating Water Multiplicities is a curatorial research project that understands the so-called “global water crisis” as a crisis of relationship, perception, and worlding practices. The project investigates which modes of knowing and governing water have shaped ecological disruption during decades of mining in North Rhine-Westfalia. By addressing epistemic and ontological conditions, the project opens space for rethinking how water is encountered, narrated, and related to. It is addressing water as multiple, relational, and temporally layered, shaping and being shaped by overlapping geological, industrial, ecological, and political processes.
The project is situated in the Rhenish lignite mining district, a landscape profoundly transformed by groundwater extraction, open-pit mining, and energy infrastructures. In this region, aquifers circulate through pipes, streams emerge out of power plants, and future lakes already structure the present through technocratic planning and speculative imaginaries. Within this context, Curating Water Multiplicities frames curating as a worlding practice. Curating is understood as the composition of situations in which heterogeneous water worldings—scientific, infrastructural, ecological, affective, and more-than-human—can encounter one another while remaining irreducible to a single explanatory frame. Worlding, following Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) and Donna Haraway (2008), refers to the ontologically participatory process through which language and stories actively shape rather than merely describe reality. It denotes a material-semiotic practice of co-fabricating worlds in entangled, multispecies constellations, where worlds are continuously made-with rather than given or preexisting.
Methodology
Walking plays a central role within this approach. Drawing on posthuman and feminist walking methodologies, walking-with (Sundberg 2014; Springgay/ Trumpman 2018) functions as a relational practice that attunes bodies to landscapes shaped by extraction, rupture, and infrastructural violence. Participants move through these environments as embodied actors within hydro-relational fields, cultivating attentiveness through shared movement. By walking with water ghosts, participants experienced how infrastructural narratives shape perception while marginalizing water’s temporal multiplicity and relational agency. The project demonstrates that other water worldings take form through practices that render uncertainty, loss, and more-than-human temporalities perceptible and discussable. Curating emerges here as a practice of holding open: sustaining epistemic openness, resisting technocratic closure, and cultivating response-ability toward waters that continue to haunt the present as well as future imaginaries.
Vivian Hernandez developed walking-with exercises using a zine of simple perceptual prompts that redirected attention away from the visual spectacle of the Hambach mine toward bodily sensation, fatigue, disorientation, and infrastructural sound. By asking participants to notice how their bodies responded to pipes, pumps, and voids, the activation rendered temporality “out of joint” and transformed the mine into an affective space where extraction, future planning, and embodied unease intersect
