Liquid Ground | HYPERMAREMMA

We take for granted that the water we drink comes from the reservoir of our house, or of our cities. However, we forget about the journey that water has accomplished and all the social and historical connotations that accompany it.

We are bodies of water and through constant liquid exchange we inhabit other bodies of water from around the planet. Such a hydrological cycle has no hierarchy, it is a constantly wet exchange from the depths of the ocean to the reservoir of our homes.

In fact, it is not only a question of displacement of water but also of fragmentation through time. Our bodies carry the same water that fed dinosaurs millions years ago. It is being considered that the first living creature on the planet was a micro organism called Archaea, this creature has slowly evolved into more complex beings until finally taking on a human form.

This evolutionary journey is missing in our common understanding of life. We are in debt to one another, and we forget this. For this reason, Lucy Irigaray has romantically dedicated the following words to Friederich Nietzche, in her book Marine Lover: ‘So remember the liquid ground.’ Nietzsche hardly ever speaks of marine creatures, nor mentions the importance of water in his philosophical writings. But, here Irigaray helps us to remember our watery past and the hydrocommonality that makes life thrive and evolve. By remembering the liquid ground we recall our aquatic past and our embodiment of other bodies of water that have always inhabited this planet.

If we consider ourselves as bodies of water we gain the ability to challenge a heteronormative proliferation of life. The embodiment of other bodies of water becomes a post-human politics of life, in which our body acquires the potentiality of becoming a being other than ourselves. The idea behind ‘embodiment’ insists that we must live as bodies in a commonality that extends beyond the human, into a more expansive sense of ‘we’.

In order to expand our awareness of being a body, we must seek new forms of embodiment in nature. We need to expand our notion of the body on this planet, to listen to our potentialities of becoming the other, of becoming something else.

I am an embodiment of the sea, and all its living creatures, I am a carrier bag of water and it’s history. I embody the frustration of a terrestrial creature which was a fish.

I struggle to walk on the street because once I was used to swim. My own body is a repetition of the myriad of bodies of water that precede me and bathe me into being.