This project follows the rain to understand water and its entanglements. Future Rains converges and challenges artistic and scientific methodologies to surpass an ontological human bias. It proposes a human decentre process that allocates agency to biotic and abiotic factors. The project develops from previous artistic and research experiences to explore the generative role of artistic practices in the relationship between people and their ecosystems.

The project explores new ways of engaging with water, rethinking its perceptions while contributing to improving water management practices (SDG goal 6) and taking immediate action on climate change (SDG goal 13). The proposal aims at a more equalitarian and (bio)diverse society with the potential to expand existing notions of sustainability and green economy to the complexities of a multispecies society where coexistence, coevolution, and empathy are vital markers rather than yielding, competition, exploitation, and domestication of the Other. The investigation focuses on water and its entanglements: material, biological, aesthetic, nonhuman, cultural, political, economic, and social. Departing from the Zêzere catchment area, it implements an exploratory study expandable to broader discussions on ecosystem functions, biodiversity, environmental awareness, and climate action.

The methodological approach combines walking along a long-distance hiking route, producing a photographic project reflecting on the catchment area, encounters with the population, interviews with water stakeholders to debate and share the project’s findings and contaminate stakeholders’ discourses with more-than-human perspectives, reflection, and introspection formulated in a website for future research. The outcomes include new methodologies for multispecies interactions, improved relationships with water and the natural environment, expanded notions of ethnographic and environmental engaged practices, re-evaluation of languages and narratives employed in ecosystem functions, and Water-management processes; new works of art and several outreaching actions impacting environmental perception; direct climate action.

The outputs will be materialised in a combination of scientific and artistic propositions: one international peer-reviewed publication, two conference presentations, a project’s monograph, an exhibition, and a website aggregating and documenting the project for future studies.

In this project, we:

1. Challenge different and complementary perspectives and languages of inquiry, i.e. artistic and scientific.

2. Re-evaluate binary notions of the environment (e.g. Industrial versus Wilderness, Human versus Nature, Us versus Them) and how these epistemologies detach people from their environment.

3. Investigate the value of decentring the human importance in the world, producing, and discussing novel ways of relating to the more-than-human world through art-based research to be transposed to other disciplines.

4. Contribute to a more equalitarian and emphatic society among its citizens (biotic and abiotic).

Team:

Aprígio Morgado (LIDA – ESAD.CR – Polytechnic of Leiria)
Lígia Afonso (LIDA – ESAD.CR – Polytechnic of Leiria)
Jorge Varanda (University of Coimbra)
Paula Castro (University of Coimbra).

Consultors:

John Wainwright (Durham University, UK)
Patrícia Barbas (ISCTE and Barbas Lopes Arquitetos)