Water Memory, Fluid Futures

Switching between past events and speculative representations of the future, the films by Clara Jo, Pierre Pauze and Yuyan Wang question our senses, perceptions and human condition via modified states of conscience, introspection and contemplation. These artists take a critical look at what the aquatic element represents, and the role water plays giving life to other worlds and shaping our historic, scientific, environmental and geographic imagination, and how we envisage the future. Echoing each other, each film opens up worlds undergoing perpetual reconfiguration, mingling fiction, memories, dreams and reality, myths and archives. The multiple forms of liquid are central to (re)considering notions of cycles, hybridity, flow, overlapping, dissolution and cure.  

At the intersection between science, science fiction, mythology and post-internet cultural issues, Pierre Pauze imagines a world in which pseudo-scientific research “on water’s memory” can renew our conception of the human species and lead to the liberation of social and romantic relationships in Please Love Party. In Mizumoto, a science fiction account with a queer retro-futurist aesthetic, various characters from parallel worlds wonder about the potential of water and a new discipline, “aqua-metaphysics”, against a backdrop of esoteric theories. In this future society, in which water is a flow of data and knowledge comparable to the cloud, social media is hacked by a form of life of unknown origin. 

Starting with satisfying videos which proliferate on Internet to spark joy and help us relax, Yuyan Wang’s One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean embodies the seeking of artificial “oceanic sentiment” and entropy of our information societies, to the point of exhaustion. The flux of found footage* is set to a repetitive soundtrack, inspired by ASMR* techniques.  

In Wallpaper Stories, a fictional interpretation of British painter Mary Barnes’ memoirs published in 1973, Clara Jo retraces her mental health journey as an online odyssey in which the protagonist seeks out alternative spiritual experiences and her own private mythology, navigating uncharted, psychedelic waters that can potentially cure her.  

*found footage describes the recuperation, mostly on Internet, and presentation of part or all of a film as a video recording.  

*ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response, is a relaxation technique that procures a pleasant tingling or shivery sensation in the skull, scalp or other peripheral body parts, in response to visual, auditive, olfactive and cognitive stimuli.