Mardi Denham-Roberts

Honours

I acknowledge the Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung, Taungurung and Barkindji peoples as the original and rightful custodians who never ceded sovereignty over the lands and waters where this project was developed. I pay my respects to elders past and present. Land back now.

Growing up amidst the colonial infrastructure of Narrm (Melbourne), I can’t remember having any awareness of where the water that sustained me had come from; where it became saturated enough to flow as a stream, what it was suffused in before that, what creatures it may have met along the way, what matter it carried with it or where it was left behind. These, perhaps, are the repercussions of the material conditions of plumbing infrastructure – removing water from its entangled reality and delivering it to us as an anonymous substance. The water that raised me was supplied through chrome plated steel taps which didn’t encourage me to ask anything more about this fluid’s story. In pipelines and pumps, the reach of water’s inherent entanglement is restricted and constrained. A material dislocation from watery liveliness is perpetuated.

How can we, as bodies of water who now largely rely on these extractive systems, seep towards more intimate and embodied understandings with water? How can we speculatively map water systems that foreground webs of relation and better acknowledge a leaky, intangible, suffusive reality?