Water Moving was a 12-day contemplative investigation examining the movement of water. Every day on the floor of the gallery I marked the paths along which the water traveled and evaporated.
My durational performance “Water Moving” was part of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, at Arti et Amicitiae, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 11 through June 23, 2019. The performance took place over twelve days, six hours each day.
The context of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, organized by Anna J. van Stuijvenberg and Jolanda Jansen, was a focus on landscape, on boreal forests and their growth and decline, translated into artworks using paper and water and graphite to explore concepts of disintegration and decay.
In the performance of “Water Moving” I watched water disappear as it moved across the floor and evaporated. I started each day at a different point on a circle drawn around the perimeter of the room. I poured out a liter of water towards the center of the room, and then watched and marked its movement. On each hour I drew a line around the water that remained, writing the date and time along the lines.
I quickly realized that it was really the water that was performing, and invited the public to join me in watching the water evaporate. They examined the traces of the water from previous days, and the way that those drawings began to reveal a topographic map of the surface of the floor. While intimately-scaled and perhaps deceptively simple, this performance also allowed us to consider larger questions.
Taking my cue from the visitors, we sometimes sat in silence watching the water disappear, or at the reflections that moved across its surface, but other times we had conversations that ranged from the personal to the political, from discussions of poetry to science. We talked about time passing, and how it felt to slow down enough to watch a process that was nearly invisible. We discussed the phenomenon of surface tension, and the cycles of rain and evaporation and the formation of clouds. We examined the salts that are left behind even as clean drinking water evaporates. We considered the movement of the tides, the Dutch’s ongoing relationship to water, and how the country survives below sea level. We mourned the depletion of the earth’s fresh water, and the impact of global warming.
At the end of the twelve days the entire floor was covered in a drawing that marked the passing of time, and the vanishing of twelve liters of water into the air.
