WATER HAS PERFECT MEMORY is the pilot for re:arc institute’s initiatives supporting the research and development for the syllabus of Reconstructions, and experimental course and platform at the Royal institute of Art in Stockholm founded and led by Marie-Louise Richards, Lecturer in Architecture.
The title of the pilot is inspired by a passage in Toni Morrison’s essay Sites of Memory: “…remembering is emotional memory, what the nerves of the skin remember as well as how it appeared…All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
The research and development process of the project is invested in blackness as a site of radical possibility—and the worldmaking aesthetics, ecologies and poetics of black feminist refusal of separability. The film is a documentation of a day of experimental sessions together with participants of the Reconstructions course and invited guests.
Centering the invisible, emotional and affective labor required to refuse the world as we know it, the sessions sought to reflect on the question: What kind of reparative world-building practice could emerge if careful attention was paid to the invisible, bodily, affective work, and the physical and mental cost that are demanded in undermining colonial scripts? How can we collectively and individually metabolize what we study together? Orienting around these questions the day unfolded as an immersive, performative experiment for the reconstructions of spaces for black feminist fugitivity and futurity. Exploring, embodiment through resonances, frequencies and vibrations. The sessions were facilitated and led by artist and embodiment researcher Camille Sapara Barton, with sonic transitions curated by artist, composer and performer Ayesha Quraishi.
Watch the film here.
Application deadline for next year’s Reconstructions course is April 10.
Read more about the course and how to apply here.
Images and film credits:
Film and research project by Marie-Louise Richards. Photography, sound and editing by Caio Marques De Oliveira. Supported by re:arc institute.
