Ultra HD Video
4 hours 25 minutes
2024
“Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water.” Astrida Neimanis
The human body is not discrete or individual, it is not sealed and defined; it is sponge like and weeping, it exists intermingled and reliant on other matter. Cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis speaks of the myth of individualism, of how one's body is “multiscalar and multigenerational; porous and palimpsestic…it is never only one thing, in only one place, or only ‘itself’”. Through this we recognise that the delineation of membranes are complex, that we must ponder how to locate oneself amongst a sea of other matter. We are planetary bodies.
Biologically the body is watery, flowing with intracellular and extracellular fluids. It is fed by rains, rivers and tides. It secretes and absorbs, replenishing itself before leaking once again. We are in constant exchange with our environment, physical, cultural and geopolitical, storing the histories of the water we ingest. Our brains, bones and organs are all watery flesh, a continuous flow that endures even once burned or buried within the earth. A hydrological cycle unto itself.
One year ago my body became part of its own hydrological cycle while birthing a child; followed closely by a placenta. I leaked amniotic fluids and plasma. I became part of generations of people whose bodies circulated through birth and death in minutes, the arrival of a vernix coated baby and the discarding of a now lifeless temporary organ. Over forty litres of blood per hour passes through the placenta to support life in utero, over fifty percent water. Whatever the mother ingests; food, liquid, medication, pollution, social unrest, disease, flows through the placenta. It filters and pumps life, a womb connected to its environment.
All human and non-human bodies are entangled to this watery planet through a fluid continuum. Our aqueous imaginary must no longer perceive water as ‘out there’, it is definitively close, it binds us and holds us, it makes bodies and networks and ecologies proliferate.
The human body is not discrete or individual, it is not sealed and defined; it is sponge like and weeping, it exists intermingled and reliant on other matter. Cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis speaks of the myth of individualism, of how one's body is “multiscalar and multigenerational; porous and palimpsestic…it is never only one thing, in only one place, or only ‘itself’”. Through this we recognise that the delineation of membranes are complex, that we must ponder how to locate oneself amongst a sea of other matter. We are planetary bodies.
Biologically the body is watery, flowing with intracellular and extracellular fluids. It is fed by rains, rivers and tides. It secretes and absorbs, replenishing itself before leaking once again. We are in constant exchange with our environment, physical, cultural and geopolitical, storing the histories of the water we ingest. Our brains, bones and organs are all watery flesh, a continuous flow that endures even once burned or buried within the earth. A hydrological cycle unto itself.
One year ago my body became part of its own hydrological cycle while birthing a child; followed closely by a placenta. I leaked amniotic fluids and plasma. I became part of generations of people whose bodies circulated through birth and death in minutes, the arrival of a vernix coated baby and the discarding of a now lifeless temporary organ. Over forty litres of blood per hour passes through the placenta to support life in utero, over fifty percent water. Whatever the mother ingests; food, liquid, medication, pollution, social unrest, disease, flows through the placenta. It filters and pumps life, a womb connected to its environment.
All human and non-human bodies are entangled to this watery planet through a fluid continuum. Our aqueous imaginary must no longer perceive water as ‘out there’, it is definitively close, it binds us and holds us, it makes bodies and networks and ecologies proliferate.
With thanks to my kin Ida for bringing this story into my world and offering me a way of understanding my own body as part of a planetary whole. To my partner Wilson for sharing this journey with me.
Edit and sound design: Wilson Bambrick
Platform Arts, Geelong. January - February 2024
Edit and sound design: Wilson Bambrick
Platform Arts, Geelong. January - February 2024