Project Introduction & Concept

Curating Water Multiplicities 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 Multiplicities frames curating as a worlding practice (1). 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

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.