Grammar of Water

conference

curated by Kirsten Cooke

​

with Ami Clarke, Anne Haaning and Ayesha Hameed

 

Thursday 30th April 6pm - 9pm

​Goldsmiths: Cinema (Richard Hoggart Building)

​

We continue to be organised by the logics and language of neoliberalism that pictures water as being a consistent ‘stock’ of transparent H2O molecules. This is opposed to what we can sense - in our guts - that we are each one body of water amidst a plethora of site-specific bodies of water that run through us. This conference asks, what could a Grammar of Water look, feel, read and sound like if we follow our guts through sonics, a film screening and performative lecture.

 

Grammar of Water refers to writing as a metaphor for the way in which humans inscribe into the planet, and how the neoliberal model has failed to conceptualise that the planet also writes and is currently writing back. This current grammar is punctuating our bodies and Earth’s planetary body; producing a set of extractive relations that need re-orientating.

 

Ayesha Hameed’s, Brown Atlantis Radio takes the shape of an experimental radio program that is an invitation to practitioners in the field of sonic art, music and performative thought. It explores the entanglements between Brown and Black bodies from the African diaspora, Indigenous peoples from South America and South Asians displaced by indenture, who are connected through the experience of oceanic colonial routes. 


 

Anne Haaning’s, Half Hidden centres on an abandoned cryolite mine in Ivittuut, Greenland and re-contextualises an amalgamation of archival materials. Haaning examines technological development within a broader historical perspective on resource extraction, mining and imperialism. Today the flooded mine stands as a scar in the Greenlandic landscape: a flat plane of water and an enormous geographical and symbolic void, concealing centuries of history. 

 

Ami Clarke’s, Meeting The Lough On Its Own Terms brings a more-than-human approach to developing the Rights of Nature at Lough Neagh; a live ecocide, where the largest body of water in Ireland and the UK is overwhelmed by algae blooms. The story of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s work on microbial life challenges the ideological construction of neoliberalism, developed via Neo-Darwinist concepts of competition and the selfish gene, with her emphasis on symbiotic life, where organisms emerge in synthesis with the environment.

 

If language organises how and what we can think, then we need alternative grammars (logic systems) both to write (on a textual and local planetary scale) with water and reimagine ourselves as water. How can the grammar of images, sonics and text in artistic and curatorial practices reorientate these watery inscriptions? How can we learn from water in organising ourselves differently?

 

Grammar of Water is the next stage in Kirsten Cooke’s project, Fluid Ground (2023 – ongoing). Recent output includes the curated book of artistic commissions, Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground published by Matt’s Gallery and The Poorhouse Reading Rooms (2025); Gut Feeling, a talk with Ami Clarke at Banner Repeater, as part of the Symbiotic Relationships programme of Ami’s exhibition, Meeting The Lough On Its Own Terms (on until 23rd May 2026). Thank you to Arts Council England and Goldsmiths for funding.

​

Thank you to Arts Council England and Goldsmiths for funding.

​