4 5 #1 Linking Bodies of Water by María Mazzanti & Anna Bierler During 5 days, students will develop zinemaking and publishing skills focusing on water to explore connection and belonging in response and opposition to contemporary alienation. Post-human theories about water have become more popular in design due to their capacity to critically rethink our relationship with others, the environment, the cities we design and ourselves. During the workshop, we will think with water and explore the watery entanglements that intimately link us to the world. In the workshop, we will explore the idea of hydrocommons. We are water, a precious liquid that siphons between bodies and the enviroment. Water composes matter and life and is a marker of climate change as rising sea levels make visible our careless attitude towards it. A more-thanhuman hydrocommons presents an opportunity to challenge individuality, anthropocentrism, and alienation by enabling a critical eye towards our individualistic perspectives. Every morning, students will encounter short exercises and themes to explore watery entanglements. In the afternoon, they will develop a series of critical insights and produce a zine, using methodologies such as writing, image making, collaging etc. By the end of the week, the zines will be presented as a big archive of water stories, images and ideas of living together otherwise. Water has been regarded as a carrier of knowledge and memory throughout history. The zines’ serve as vessels for preserving and transmitting personal stories, experiences, and insights, much like water carrying the ‘ghosts of bodies’ and the meanings within them, as mentioned in Neimanis’ quote. Publishing is a collective practice, an initiator of publics and counterpublics. Additionally, self-publishing provides a platform to reclaim agency and develop a critical design voice. These tools enable people to create and share their own ideas, breaking free from dominant narratives that may contribute to feelings of alienation. During the workshop, we will develop simple printing methods, use phones, scanners and computers. The flexibility of the zine allows for multiple disciplines to work together. Students can have different backgrounds and skills. From writers and artists to photographers and industrial designers, the publishing process allows for all of them to work freely and collaboratively. Through the integration of graphic design, writing practices, and publishing tools, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of how these disciplines can intersect and complement one another in the pursuit of critical design and reconnection. “Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of meaning and matter.To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water. When ‘nature calls’ some time later, we return to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, our chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace excretions, but also the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable culture, medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect. Just as the deep oceans harbor particulate records of former geological eras, water retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would rather forget. Our distant and more immediate pasts are returned to us in both trickles and floods” Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism
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