Water, moving/How do you love?
Casa Lu, Tlalpan, Mexico City, January 2025
‘The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it.’
- Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger - On Palestine and Narrative (1)
Water, moving/How do you love? explores individual and collective experiences of engaging with water, in critical and celebratory ways.
Hammad's quote serves as a reminder of the ways in which atrocities, including genocide, endure through the interconnected systems that are relied upon, and in spite of impulses to deny them. Working as a guest on Nahuatl land as a resident at Casa Lu, and as a guest living on Wurundjeri Country as a settler in Australia, this body of work recognises the complex and compelling power of water, and its waterways, through personal, cultural and political narrativising and imagination.
The title offers a variation in the translation of the Nahuatl word ‘Atlipa’, as the name of the residency site, meaning ‘always water’ in English. It recognises the tension that exists with urgent demands for clean, available water during a time of water crisis in Mexico City. Despite the devastation of colonial, extractive intervention, the work acknowledges resilient and creative practices that have continued, as carried through First Nations communities, and with other consultative and responsive collectives.
The exhibition spans two sites. Despite the appearance of separation, there is continuity in the shared materials and expressions that flow between them. The indoor space brings together a selection of works made possible through engaging with material qualities and ephemeral experiences from the artist’s time in Mexico City and at Casa Lu. It features oil paintings, pencil drawings and collage created using recycled cardboard and paper and experimentation with dyes from avocado, beetroot and bougainvillea waste collected from the household and garden, and excess tortillas to make adhesives.
These materials also respond to the seepage across time, through living and waste cycles, as well as animate/inanimate binaries. Their repurposing serves to highlight the transformative potential that water embodies, as well as the action required to care for it, and each other.
The subjects invoked comprise of studies of water in different textural and sensory states, considering the fluidity of horizons and orientation.
Their specific framing, and concealment, through the layering of paint and other collage materials speaks to both the impulse to draw attention to, and away from, other unseen subjects.
The second part of the exhibition is held in an internal courtyard. The emptied pool will be filled with water that has been dyed using avocado waste, and other organic materials from the household, to then be drained to support irrigation in the garden. The dyed water is informed by aesthetic and political motivations to draw attention to the vibrancy of a communal, leisurely space, in tension with connotations of blood, as an undercurrent to relationships with privilege, luxury, and death (2). In the water, different works are floating and submerged, including the avocado in their decaying and potential state, recognising concerted efforts to transform avocado waste in farming regions of Michoacán province to reduce pollutants in contested river systems (3).
The desire to explore the dynamic between water and remembering, joy and mourning, is further explored through inviting the audience’s participation during the opening of the show.
Water, moving/How do you love? is interested in questions of inextricability and boundaries in life and death, but also how we limit and expand other fictions and realities - what else exceeds the frames we impose on them?
- Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger - On Palestine and Narrative, Fern Press, 2024
- https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-03-08/mexico-womens-day-protest, https://www.facebook.com/fuentes.rojas.5
3. Sayra Orozco, Luis Bernardo López-Sosa, Esteban Montiel, Jaime Espino, Roberto Guerra, Joel Vargas, Ismeli Alfonso, Michel Rivero, ‘Green practices in wastewater treatment: Upcycling avocado waste for enhanced water sanitation. Case study: WWTP in San Francisco Pichátaro, Michoacán,’ Results in Engineering, Volume 24, 2024, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590123024016001?via%3Dihub