is a collaborative project using music, dance, and visual art to explore the ways water infrastructure visibilizes complex entanglements between contamination, property, and the promise of health.

We have created and shared choreographies, musical scores, multimedia exhibitions, and guided walks. Currently, we are exploring the curb stop: a shut off valve in a water pipe that runs from a water main to a building, common in North America. Collaborators include Alexandra Lakind, Ro(b)//ert Lundberg, Jasmine Lupe Mendoza Carrascom, among others.

The above images are part of a years-long photographic project (Ro(bert) Lundberg and Alexandra Lakind) documenting water and sewer line covers in sidewalks and streets—circles that hint at vast systems many prefer not to be bothered by. The sidewalk covers also mark the division between public and private property underground, the settler legal landscape physically manifesting for those walking above.

water%holding
video collaboration, 2022

musical score composed by Ro Lundberg to sonify the underground water infrastructure, as a method to investigate how such hidden systems manifest private property relations and clean (or not) drinking water. The score is overlaid on the video, moving at nearly an imperceptible rate across the screen.

the choreographic interpretation of score, video, & wearables by Nina Vroemen as part of an ongoing collaboration that activates their speculative potential as lead-water garments.

Chicago, 2023

“As a responsive and promiscuous solvent, water is rarely pure and is always picking up, carrying along, dropping off, and bonding with other elements. In this sense, it materially communicates where it has been, what has occurred elsewhere, and even what is possible.”
– Cecilia Chen

Chicago, 2023

Thank you Watershed Art & Ecology for hosting 𝕨𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕣%𝕙𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘—movement, music, and more examining how water infrastructure visibilizes complex entanglements between contamination, property, and the promise of health.

And to the City of Chicago, your warmth was top notch.
Collaborators include artists Alexandra Lakind, Ro Lundberg, Aaron Walker, Tamas Kemenczy, Jasmine Mendoza, Sam Scranton, and Jeff Kimmel.

Viral Ecologies is a multipronged investigation of emergence. Emergence as the process of revelation after concealment. Emergence as small parts that give rise to complex patterns and systems. And emergence as the coalescence of new thought. 

co-curated by collaborators E. Saffronia Downing and Rosemary Holliday Hall.

Originally created as part of the
Low-Carbon Research Methods Group 2022 DIY MethodsConference