Making for RainDrought

Making for rain / drought

I made this little portable window water harvester at the weekend  - following reading some of Swyngedouw on Water, Nature and the Urban, and looking at the backs of houses paraded along the railway line to Waterloo. 

The idea is there are 3 or 4 different and interchangeable types of 'sheet' . 

Lets say...

One is for Dew - made out of some net Like structure.

One is for cooling water  - made out of some wool. 

One has a huge surface area  - for frost to form on. 

You have to practise understanding the weather - and know which one to put outside your window - if any at all. You can collect your own water if you are sensitive to its manifestations.

It may be a viable source of potable water, it may be something pleasurable in itself  - a practise that starts to tune you in, a ritual to demonstrate ones potential independence of water bills, and of waiting for others to do the purifying.

Perhaps it is the quotidian event that adheres you to a new quasi- religion.  

I have the feeling it is somehow not 'tough-enough' or presented in a tough enough way - it comes across as whimsical, perhaps this is the materials or the fact that it is not fully thought through.


Tom thinks it is very vaginal - and that it would look good on the side of the Gherkin or the Shard. It is born out of feminist science theory after all. 

No one in my all - female crit group said anything about its vaginal qualities. They said though that I should provide glimpses of the process I go through trying to meet Water in different ways. I need to film myself working in my conservatory while the rain thrashes on my roof and the multitude of bedsheets on the line outside that have been uncontrollably wee-d on, get uncontrollably wee-d on in bucket loads by the clouds. 


Thoughts 

Sometimes I feel so lighthearted about this idea collaborating with Water, sometimes it feels like the most deeply complex, neuron tangling and loaded thing I have tried to do. They both exist at once - it is both of these things always. 

I am optimistic that at some point I will be able to think about it both ways simultaneously.

I am mindful of when I get overwhelmed that I want to cover all the bases in some sort of logical way - be thorough: be intimate with water, negate the infrastructures, make something practical, respond to the weather, feel it on my skin -  and that's when it looses everything. I think these collaborations are moments, an anthology of partial experiences built over time.  

I am starting to visualise a type of architecture that is something like a collision of intentions, a materially cohesive, bender-ish, shanty-ish, under the canal bridge -ish thing that looks like it could be organised but has decided not to be. I know what I mean anyway. 


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I am constantly contemplating my position in the middle of all of this, today I had a moment where I felt like a very complicated balloon filled with water, it was a wobbly epiphany of what I am. I also felt my mood changed by a cool shower. I feel my body changed in shape by water inside. 

I wonder if collaboration is arrogant, like someone who reveals their arrogance by speaking about equality as something they are happy to 'give'.


Water  is much more than me - I wonder if it needs me at all?


But if we are living in the anthropocene*, Water and I are both quasi - hybrids, cyborgs. 


*Anthropocene |ˈanθrəpəˌsēn|nounthe current geological age, viewed as having begun about 200 years ago with the significant impact of human activity on the ecosphere.ORIGIN 2000: based on Greek anthrōpos ‘human being’ + kainos ‘recent’ ; reportedly coined by chemist Paul Crutzen (1933– ).