Intro Flashcards
Water Surrounds Us (Steve Mentz)
Visible tides are only easy to discern on oceans, or a few lakes, but all bodies of water respond to the moon’s pull. Even the water in my body, and yours, shifts in micro-tidal patterns. In juxtaposing the water that makes up roughly sixty percent of my own body with the forces that move vast basins of saltwater across the surface of the planet, this preface aims to foreground the interpretive challenge of multiple scales. Water surrounds us – in our bodies, our neighborhoods, and our planet.
Water Surrounds Us (Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters)
Water is simultaneously encountered as a depth and as a surface, as a set of fixed locations but also as an ungraspable space that is continually being reproduced by mobile molecules; water has a taken-for granted materiality (liquidity, or wetness), but it is also just one of three physical states that exist in continual interchange (the other two being ice and vapour). Each of these properties can be ascribed to land as well (land too has depth, underlying mobility, and transformation across physical states), but in water these properties are distinct in the speed and rhythm of mobility, the persistent ease of transformation, and the enclosing materiality of depth. Thus, it would seem that water provides a fertile environment for rethinking the ways in which our political geographies emerge from – and impose themselves on – a dynamic, voluminous materiality.
Water Surrounds Us (Veronica Strang)
The most constant ‘quality’ of water is that it is not constant, but is characterised by transmutability and sensitivity to changes in the environment. Physically, it is the ultimate ‘fluid’, filling any containing shape and, equally easily, shrinking and disappearing into the earth or evaporating into the ether. It has an extraordinary ability to metamorphose rapidly into substances with oppositional qualities, that is, the highly visible, concrete solidity of ice, and the fleeting dematerialisation of steam. Each state is endlessly reversible, so that this polymorphic range is always potentially present. In every aspect, water moves between oppositional extremes: it may be a roaring flood, or a still pool, invisible and transparent, or reflective and impenetrable. It may be life-giving, providing warm amniotic support and essential hydration, or it may burn, freeze or drown. Each of these states has its own qualities and is imbued with its own meanings, and all are always there in potential.
Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia Giola vs Natural Pool, Greece
- surrounded by greenery
- one’s in a national park, image of the country
- they can swim in the one in Greece
“The Sea Is History”
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. (Derek Walcott)
