Since the Mesopotamian hydrotechnologists, who specialised in irrigation systems, water has been harnessed for many different purposes (such as mills, hydraulic hammers, etc.). The biggest move of disciplining waters though started in the nineteenth century with straightening the rivers, draining swamps and moors and setting up a covering structure of water pipes. Until the end of the eighteenth century water was considered to be a manifestation of divine grace, of life and of purification and healing. But from then on, water was just water, HO2, and till today the story of water concentrates on purification in a chemical sense. Water is being polluted, becomes scarce and ‘withdraws’ from the biosphere, while at the same time more and more land is flooded due to the melting of the polar ice sheets. This is the situation in which ‘The Network of Dissident Women’ has tried to follow the double path of water on its own land in the valley along the Pulkau – the dirtiest river in Lower Austria – by setting up practical hypotheses: exploring and mapping underground waters with rods, drilling for water pipes and creating ponds and holy water holes, while at the same time carrying out reforestation and humus cultivation projects.
Part of Episode XXIX: “The Right to Flow: Water as Source of Life, Conflict, and Legal Utopias”
With Edson Krenak Naknunuk, Erena Rangimarie Omaki Ransfield Rhöse, Kathrin Röggla, Elisabeth von Samsonow & Florian Malzacher
21. September 2024 – Tangente Festival St. Pölten / Austria
In the frame of the exhibition “The Way of the Water”
Biography
Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist and Professor of Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research focuses on philosophy and the history of religion, the theory of collective consciousness, the history and present of the relationship between art and religion, the theory and history of the perception of women as well as female identity and the abolition of the ego in modernity. Her artistic work includes sculpture, performance, painting and video. Among other things, she deals with the systematic and symbolic place of female sculpture in the canon of the arts and an ecological aesthetics or geo-logic of the body. Her latest publications include Museum des Anfangs (2023), The Dissident Goddesses Project (2021), Epidemic Subjects. Radical Ontologies (2017), Egon Schiele. Wiener Enzyklopädie (with Ursula Storch, 2016) and Egon Schiele. Sanctus Franciscus Hystericus (2012).