During my Ars-Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biology Station the first week I was taking part of Field Notes 2019 in a group Strange Weather. It was intence and inspiring week to dive into different layers and stories of the area. But it was too short time to understand more than fragments of different knowledges and perspectives.
I am working with a project H2O - Creatures and after the Field Notes my main intention was to explore and listen to the different waters and to gather some recordings for my sound piece. For this ongoing project I have looked at the massive cultural changes where water’s cyclical time were condensed into simple H2O form. The mythical stories of water gave way to the linear time defined by a man. Human watery organs and the efficient processes created by them, work as modifiers of water structure and it’s flows in the environment. Water has become a commercially available, and manageable and disappearing material or a hidden landfill. However, as an element, water is still like a permeable channel, a cyclical cycle of time and an all-embracing sensor: by its very nature, a state that registers change and challenges the senses to a different experience of reality.
Here you can find more about my work: http://www.katiroover.com
I had also time to read about water and one of my favourites was Water Is Siwlkw by indigenous Okanagan poet and activist Jeannette Armstrong.
Here is short excerpt of her poem:
”… driving new wet earth down slippery slopes to make fresh land the river’s way heaving its full silt weight crushing solid rock the tide’s way smoothing old plates of stone finally deciding for all the way of ice piled blue green layer upon layer over eons sustaining this fragment of now so somewhere on her voluptuous body the rain continues to fall in the right places the mists unceasingly float upward to where they must and the fog forever ghosts across the land in the cool desert wind where no rain falls and each drop is more precious than blood balancing time in the way of the silvery hoar frost covering tundra where iridescent ice tinkles under the bellies of caribou her song is the sky’s way holding the gossamer filaments of rainbow together guarding the silent drift of perfect white flakes where the moose stop momentarily to look upward her song in the forest ensuring a leaf shaped just so captures each glistening droplet to celebrate the vast miles of liquid …” - Jeannette Armstrong