Entry 005
Water Cycle
Our 2023 will be structured through the stages of the water cycle. We wanted each of the monthly sessions to flow into each other and lead us on a journey through different energies, styles and paces of writing. The four stages we will pass through are:
Collection Phase (Jan, Feb)
Evaporation Phase (March, April, May)
Condensation Phase (June, July, Aug)
Precipitation Phase (Sept, Oct, Nov)
(Dec returns to collection)
Why the water cycle?
Firstly, water is queer. Obviously. Everyone knows that. It’s fluid, wet and you find it everywhere. That honestly should be reason enough, but there's more.
The water cycle describes a system in constant change. It is not a thing, but a series of happenings, a collection of occurrences. Molecules in a constant state of becoming, melting, evaporating, sublimating, condensing through each other as they pass through various physical states. Molecules collect, sometimes densely to solidify, or loosely in gaseous states, and in the liminal in between they swim in a molten body. These collections are how we understand community. It is not as a static entity with a fixed border but a reconfiguring substance that is constantly flowing between forms and negotiation it’s arrangement. If community is the flow of molecules then writing is the substance that occurs through this movement. Writing is the wetness, It’s the cold, the heat, the having your hair swept into experimental arrangements. Writing is a happening, formed in the moment that exchange occurs.
Structure
Now to make fiction from science, we will take you on a queer futures tour of the water cycle. This does take some extraordinary artistic liberty and any factual resemblance to the actual geological cycle at this point may just be a coincidence.
︎ Collection phase:
As water runs through streams and rivers, collecting in gradually expanding channels, pace and directionality varies. We begin by exploring the arrow of time as we pass into the new year caught in the dizzying crossfire between future/past. As bodies flowing into a larger community of water, we meet each other in this collective reservoir where here/there becomes an impossible separation. We bring with us pieces of places that dissolve into the collective memory of this watery body that is churned by the tides.
︎Evaporation Phase:
As the sun heats the molecules of our liquidy community, vibrations are passed between us. We explore motion/stillness as entropy increases. As we are passed into a gaseous configurations, we now explore the air where our presence and physicality is called into question, what is virtual/non-virtual? We unsubscribe to gravity, mixed into an atmospheric soup, where we search for each other in the margins between me/you.
︎ Condensation Phase:
From our journey through gas we begin our next transition into humidity once more. Our molecules begin to coalesce, plucking order/chaos as we become denser. Caught in the fogginess of a condensing cloud we explore visibility through transparent/opaque, finding narrative in the blurry distortion that happens in the liminality. From vastness we gather back into containment and explore scale and proximity through micro/macro.
︎ Precipitation Phase:
We pull each other in, forming communities of hypotonic water that collect in individual/collective droplets. But as we floated we also gathered unfamiliar particles which now condense into our collective body and we ask where the edges of natural/artificial lie. We now submit to gravity, falling together through acceleration/deceleration until we come to rest on the stillness of the ground once more.
21 January, 2023
posted by:
Miche
posted by:
Miche