Project Introduction & Concept

Curating Water Ecologies is a curatorial research project that understands the so-called “global water crisis” as a crisis of relationship, perception, and worlding practices. The project investigates which modes of knowing and governing water have shaped ecological disruption during decades of mining in North Rhine-Westfalia. By addressing epistemic and ontological conditions, the project opens space for rethinking how water is encountered, narrated, and related to. It is addressing water as multiple, relational, and temporally layered, shaping and being shaped by overlapping geological, industrial, ecological, and political processes.

1 Worlding, following Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) and Donna Haraway (2008), refers to the ontologically participatory process through which language and stories actively shape rather than merely describe reality. It denotes a material-semiotic practice of co-fabricating worlds in entangled, multispecies constellations, where worlds are continuously made-with rather than given or preexisting.

Theoretical Orientation:
Water, Multiplicity, and Hauntology

The project draws on posthumanist, hydrofeminist, anthropological and STS scholarship that approaches water as ontologically multiple. Water takes shape through divers practice: as hydrosocial relation, infrastructural flow, ecological habitat, chemical compound, affective presence, and historical remainder. Water is worlding worlds. These wordings coexist and interfere with one another, producing complex and sometimes contradictory water realities. As such water is never only water but emerges through material-discursive intra-actions (Barad 2017).

Towards a Hydrofeminist Hauntology:
Water Ghosts

At the center of the project is the figuration of the water ghost. Water ghosts name waters whose temporalities have been interrupted by extractive processes. These vanished springs, displaced aquifer flows, infrastructural streams, and future lakes reorganize time and space and inhabit landscapes as unresolved pasts and uncertain futures, shaping perception and politics through their spectral presence.

Water ghosts bring attention to temporal disjunctions produced by extractivism. Deep-time aquifer waters circulate at industrial speeds; geological processes are reorganized according to the clock time of energy production; ecological consequences unfold across futures that exceed human planning horizons. These circulatory watery hauntings are approached as ethical and political invitations that call for response-ability toward water beyond technocratic management.

Methodological Approach:
Composite Curating & Walking-With

Methodologically, the project develops Composite Curating as a mode of research that combines curatorial practice with composite ethnography (Hetherington 2025). Knowledge emerges through constellations (von Bismarck 2021): temporary gatherings of heterogeneous actors, materials, practices, and more-than-human agencies that remain open, relational, and situated.

Walking plays a central role within this approach. Drawing on posthuman and feminist walking methodologies, walking-with (Sundberg 2014; Springgay/ Trumpman 2018) functions as a relational practice that attunes bodies to landscapes shaped by extraction, rupture, and infrastructural violence. Participants move through these environments as embodied actors within hydro-relational fields, cultivating attentiveness through shared movement.

By walking with water ghosts, participants experienced how infrastructural narratives shape perception while marginalizing water’s temporal multiplicity and relational agency. The project demonstrates that other water worldings take form through practices that render uncertainty, loss, and more-than-human temporalities perceptible and discussable. Curating emerges here as a practice of holding open: sustaining epistemic openness, resisting technocratic closure, and cultivating response-ability toward waters that continue to haunt the present as well as future imaginaries.

Artistic activations

intertwined posthumanist phenomenological approaches
(after Astrida Neimanis 2017):

Body hermeneutics
beginning with one’s own watery embodiment
as a sensorium for ecological disturbance.

Proxy storytelling
stretching imagination, enabling absent, submerged,
or future waters to become narratable while retaining their complexity.

Altering tools of perception
such as microscopes, sound practices, and encounters
with infrastructure, which extend perception beyond human sensory limits.

Project Structure
The project unfolds in three interrelated phases.

Phase 1 – Composite Curating: Field Research
A collective, site-based research phase in which artists, researchers, and local actors explored the region’s hydrological “hot spots.” Walking, sensing, mapping, and conversation fostered attunement to water as a space-time knot shaped by extraction, governance, and contested futures.

Phase 2 – Walking-With: Public Water Walks

Two public walks translated the field research into shared experiential situations. Artistic activations, scientific insights, and embodied practices formed temporary constellations that rendered water ghosts perceptible as relational, affective, and political phenomena.

Phase 3 – Re-Assemblage as Exhibition (forthcoming)

In the final phase, the project’s multimodal outcomes are brought together, re-assembled, and made public as an exhibition. Re-Assemblage (Simon 2025) applied in the exhibition space functions as a collaborative analytical method that aims to rearrange material and knowledge in a de-hierarchized way as display while allowing complexity, ambiguity, and multiplicity to remain visible. Rather than producing a coherent, linear narrative, Re-Assemblage integrates diverse voices, materials, and modalities, making the construction of knowledge itself perceptible and enabling reflection on the shared research process.

Curating Water Ecologies

Walking with Water Ghosts in Post-Mining Landscapes

Elisabeth
Galló-Droste

Maud van de Beuken
& Sophia Bardoutsou

.DENCUENTRO

Project Introduction & Concept

Curating Water Ecologies is a curatorial research project that understands the so-called “global water crisis” as a crisis of relationship, perception, and worlding practices. The project investigates which modes of knowing and governing water have shaped ecological disruption during decades of mining in North Rhine-Westfalia. By addressing epistemic and ontological conditions, the project opens space for rethinking how water is encountered, narrated, and related to. It is addressing water as multiple, relational, and temporally layered, shaping and being shaped by overlapping geological, industrial, ecological, and political processes.

The project is situated in the Rhenish lignite mining district, a landscape profoundly transformed by groundwater extraction, open-pit mining, and energy infrastructures. In this region, aquifers circulate through pipes, streams emerge out of power plants, and future lakes already structure the present through technocratic planning and speculative imaginaries. Within this context, Curating Water Ecologies frames curating as a worlding practice1. Curating is understood as the composition of situations in which heterogeneous water worldings—scientific, infrastructural, ecological, affective, and more-than-human—can encounter one another while remaining irreducible to a single explanatory frame.1 Worlding, following Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) and Donna Haraway (2008), refers to the ontologically participatory process through which language and stories actively shape rather than merely describe reality. It denotes a material-semiotic practice of co-fabricating worlds in entangled, multispecies constellations, where worlds are continuously made-with rather than given or preexisting.

Theoretical Orientation: Water, Multiplicity, and Hauntology

Towards a Hydrofeminist Hauntology: Water Ghosts

At the center of the project is the figuration of the water ghost. Water ghosts name waters whose temporalities have been interrupted by extractive processes. These vanished springs, displaced aquifer flows, infrastructural streams, and future lakes reorganize time and space and inhabit landscapes as unresolved pasts and uncertain futures, shaping perception and politics through their spectral presence. Water ghosts bring attention to temporal disjunctions produced by extractivism. Deep-time aquifer waters circulate at industrial speeds; geological processes are reorganized according to the clock time of energy production; ecological consequences unfold across futures that exceed human planning horizons. These circulatory watery hauntings are approached as ethical and political invitations that call for response-ability toward water beyond technocratic management.

Methodological Approach: Composite Curating & Walking-With

Methodologically, the project develops Composite Curating as a mode of research that combines curatorial practice with composite ethnography (Hetherington 2025). Knowledge emerges through constellations (von Bismarck 2021): temporary gatherings of heterogeneous actors, materials, practices, and more-than-human agencies that remain open, relational, and situated.Walking plays a central role within this approach. Drawing on posthuman and feminist walking methodologies, walking-with (Sundberg 2014; Springgay/ Trumpman 2018) functions as a relational practice that attunes bodies to landscapes shaped by extraction, rupture, and infrastructural violence. Participants move through these environments as embodied actors within hydro-relational fields, cultivating attentiveness through shared movement. By walking with water ghosts, participants experienced how infrastructural narratives shape perception while marginalizing water’s temporal multiplicity and relational agency. The project demonstrates that other water worldings take form through practices that render uncertainty, loss, and more-than-human temporalities perceptible and discussable. Curating emerges here as a practice of holding open: sustaining epistemic openness, resisting technocratic closure, and cultivating response-ability toward waters that continue to haunt the present as well as future imaginaries.

Artistic activations

Artistic activations address the water ghosts in interrupted landscapes inspired by three intertwined posthumanist phenomenological approaches (after Astrida Neimanis 2017):

Body hermeneutics
beginning with one’s own watery embodiment as a sensorium for ecological disturbance.

Proxy storytelling
stretching imagination, enabling absent, submerged, or future waters to become narratable while retaining their complexity.

Altering tools of perception
such as microscopes, sound practices, and encounters with infrastructure, which extend perception beyond human sensory limits.

Project Structure

The project unfolds in three interrelated phases.

Phase 2 – Walking-With: Public Water Walks
Two public walks translated the field research into shared experiential situations. Artistic activations, scientific insights, and embodied practices formed temporary constellations that rendered water ghosts perceptible as relational, affective, and political phenomena.

Phase 3 – Re-Assemblage as Exhibition (forthcoming)
In the final phase, the project’s multimodal outcomes are brought together, re-assembled, and made public as an exhibition. Re-Assemblage (Simon 2025) applied in the exhibition space

Curating Water

Ecologies

Walking with Water Ghosts

in Post-Mining Landscapes

Walk I

Ghost Lakes: When Aquifers Fill
Pipes and Rivers Become Lakes
Peringsmaar & Hambach Mine
21 September 2025

The first walk engaged with artificial lakes, aquifer water, and future hydrological imaginaries. At the Peringsmaar, participants encountered a lake framed as successful recultivation and sustained by deep groundwater mobilized from the Hambach mine. Microscopic plankton studies revealed multispecies worlds thriving within water whose geological residence time has been radically accelerated through extraction.

These encounters brought ecological vitality into relation with histories of vanished forests, erased source zones, and displaced hydrological relations. The walk articulated a third story in which liveliness and loss coexist without resolution.

At the edge of the Hambach mine, near the planned Rhine water pipeline, the walk confronted water’s constitutive absence. Walking-with exercises shifted attention toward bodily disorientation, infrastructural rhythms, and temporal distortion. A performative figuration of a broken water nymph articulated the mine as a haunted threshold where river, lake, and void blur into an unstable future dependent on continuous infrastructural maintenance.

Riikka Tauriainen
Riikka Tauriainen’s activation worked with microscopy and embodied immersion to extend perception beyond the human scale. By collecting plankton samples while wading into the Peringsmaar, participants encountered multispecies life sustained by aquifer water that has been violently displaced and accelerated through mining infrastructures. The microscopic organisms made palpable the collision of deep-time hydrological processes with industrial circulation, revealing the lake as a site where ecological vitality and hydrological violence coexist without resolution.

Marie Donike

Marie Donike’s culinary intervention translated extractivist water relations into an act of ingestion. Through a shared picnic referencing mining labour and landscape transformation, participants incorporated the region’s industrial ecology into their own bodies. The activation foregrounded transcorporeality, challenging the fantasy of external control over water by insisting that human bodies are already materially entangled with reconfigured hydrological systems.

Vivian Hernandez

Vivian Hernandez developed walking-with exercises using a zine of simple perceptual prompts that redirected attention away from the visual spectacle of the Hambach mine toward bodily sensation, fatigue, disorientation, and infrastructural sound. By asking participants to notice how their bodies responded to pipes, pumps, and voids, the activation rendered temporality “out of joint” and transformed the mine into an affective space where extraction, future planning, and embodied unease intersect.

Zora Ritz

Zora Ritz concluded the walk with a performative figuration of a broken water nymph. This monstrous, non-nostalgic figure gave voice to waters forced into states of transition—neither river nor lake, neither natural nor artificial. Through storytelling and individualized prompts, the performance articulated the Hambach mine as a haunted threshold, where destroyed waters, violently repurposed flows, and uncertain futures remain bound to ongoing infrastructural maintenance.

Snack Marie Donike

↑

Walk II

Ghost Streams: When Power
Plants Turn into Springs

Gillbach, Niederaußem & Hambach
12 October 2025

The second walk followed the Gillbach, a stream that persists as an infrastructural afterlife. Once spring-fed, it now flows through warm cooling water discharged from a coal-fired power plant, carrying ancient groundwater into industrial circulation. Through narrative prompts, sound poetry, collective singing, and ritual practices, the walk rendered the Gillbach perceptible as a composite water ghost: groundwater, cooling discharge, ecological habitat, and political conflict unfolding simultaneously. Participants encountered the stream as intimate and monstrous, inviting care while embodying infrastructural dependency. The walk culminated in a performative ritual at the mine’s edge, creating a moment of care time: a suspension of solution-oriented futurity in favor of shared mourning, ethical attention, and responsibility toward damaged waterscapes.

Caroline Brünen

Caroline Brünen’s activation approached the Gillbach as a narrative counterpart rather than a hydrological object. Through a zine combining listening, writing, drawing, and photography, participants were invited to address the stream as a speaking subject. This proxy storytelling cultivated attention to the Gillbach’s layered temporalities—its ancient groundwater histories, infrastructural present, and threatened future—activating watery embodiment through imaginative transposition.

Elisabeth Galló-Droste

Elisabeth Galló-Droste presented a sound-poetic performance that connected the Gillbach to extractivist water conflicts in Colombia. Interweaving spoken word, recorded sound, and somatic impulses, the activation created a translocal polyphony in which distant waters appeared as entangled through shared histories of extraction. The performance expanded the scale of attention from the local creek to a planetary hydrocommons marked by colonial and industrial violence.

Picknick
Marie Donike

Maud van de Beuken &
Sophia Bardoutsou

At the artificial source of the Gillbach, Maud van de Beuken and Sophia Bardoutsou led a collective sound practice inside a tunnel where cooling water emerges from the power plant. By singing with the rushing stream, participants became resonant bodies amplifying the river’s already existing voice. The activation made the infrastructural containment of the stream acoustically tangible while producing an intimate, embodied relation to an otherwise technocratically managed water body.

.DENCUENTRO

The walk concluded with a performative ritual by the collective .DENCUENTRO at the edge of the Hambach mine. Beginning from experiences of ecological grief and insufficiency, the performers guided a procession and altar practice using objects collected from the Gillbach. This gesture enacted “care time”: a suspension of solution-oriented futurity in favour of collective mourning, ethical attention, and responsibility toward damaged and haunted waterscapes.