Dialogues with Water: Art Practices Toward a New Ecology
Publication information:
Abstract
What might it mean to belong without being fixed, enclosed, or claimed? This presentation reflects on a continuous curatorial inquiry that engages water as a material, spiritual, and relational agent. Grounded in hydrofeminism, more-than-human theories of care, and the anthropology of water, this framework was activated across two distinct historic and institutional contexts in Massachusetts: Water Meditations (Somerville Museum, 2022–2023) and Evaporate: Performance Art from Boston and Bergen (Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, 2023). While Water Meditations focused on inward listening and guided reflection to transform a gallery into an intimate ritual space, Evaporate expanded this inquiry into collective, improvisational, and site-responsive performances that activated the site’s water infrastructure.
By reflecting on how these projects invited audiences into open-ended co-creation and temporary fields of relation, this presentation challenges traditional definitions of belonging rooted in stability, possession, or enclosure. Instead, it proposes that belonging is an active state that emerges through attentiveness, responsiveness and participation. Through evaporation as a conceptual lens, the author argues that dissolution is not disappearance, but state-shifting transformation. Ultimately, the presentation frames impermanence as a vital ethical framework for "fluid kinships"—demonstrating how curatorial practice can cultivate meaningful relations that emerge, transform, and disperse without losing their reality or power.
Presenter Biography
Arlinda Shtuni is an Albanian-born, Boston-based curator, artist, and writer who believes that real discoveries happen in the in-between spaces — the margins of disciplines. Her curatorial projects contemplate our connection with the living world, tuning our senses to our environment and creating a receptive state in which to consider our collective future. Her art interventions have been presented at galleries, museums, and cultural institutions including the Nave Annex Gallery, the French Cultural Center, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, among others. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mass Humanities, the Mass Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council, and the French Consulate in Boston, among others. Her art criticism was shortlisted for the International Awards for Art Criticism and is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. She is a member of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.