Contemporânea

Liquid Worldings is a series of talks that engage with water, attuning to its material agencies, storied flows, and political entanglements through feminist posthumanist and material ecocritical lenses. The series seeks to open spaces for dialogue around the Blue Humanities, considering water as expressive matter—an elemental force that shapes histories, struggles, and imaginaries. These exchanges invite us to world-with water: to become-with its currents through embodied, multispecies storytelling practices that unsettle the boundaries between matter and meaning. Throughout the series, we engage with African feminist aquapoetics, Indigenous Latin American hydro-activism and hydropoetics, and the liquid politics of sound as a mode of inquiry. These conversations reflect on how art, literature, and situated listening practices can offer transformative ways of sensing, knowing, and relating to water—enacting alternative imaginaries of care, regeneration, and resistance.

Serpil Oppermann closes the series with a material ecocritical approach to the Blue Humanities, positioning water as storied matter with expressive agency. Her talk considers how water co-determines life in its exchanges with bodies, environments, and social systems. Arguing that a material ecocritical “poetics of water” offers a more generative framework than anthropocentric models, Oppermann calls for reimagining our entangled relations with waterscapes. Her contribution opens space to reflect on how we narrate, inhabit, and make sense of watery environments, fostering more attentive and transformative knowledge practices.

Liquid Worldings proposes a practice of attentive listening to the narrative ecologies of water, where artistic and speculative practices become modes of world-making, of regenerating and transforming relations between bodies, territories, and liquid materialities, calling forth gestures of resistance, insurgent care, and radical reimagination.

— Salomé Lopes Coelho, Curator