Water Beyond Resource: Making and Thinking through Water

This course examines water in its relational, social, and ecological dimensions. Through field trips, artistic practice, readings and critical reflection, we explore water beyond a mere resource and follow its material and imaginative significance.

In Western societies, fresh water is often treated as a resource that is consumed, exploited, polluted, and regulated. It has been taken for granted that there is water – enough and yet not too much. Climate change has shown that this has changed drastically for some parts of the world. In this course we will engage with critical scholarship, field trips, and artistic practice to imagine water beyond a mere resource. 

We want to explore water as entangled within relations – as anthropologist Andrea Ballestero suggests: “water is always more than itself”. We will approach fresh water as liquid that has been part of our bodies, as medium, collaborator, archive, or as source of imagination.

Readings and text discussion as well as an exhibition visit will help us to decenter our gaze and develop a methodological framework on how to think through water. A trip to Floating University, a nature-culture learning site in the rainwater retention pool of the former Berlin Tempelhof airport, aims to conceive of water as situated while taking into account its social and ecological implications. 

Through cyanotype experiments on fabric and playful underwater writing at a Berlin lake, participants will engage with light, wind, and water, allowing these forces to shape visual and textual artefacts as well as imagination. A crucial element of working directly on-site with natural elements will be to explore what is at hand. In this way, the workshop enables participants to consider how artistic practice can be approached as in situ, spatiotemporal, and sustainable.

The aim of this course is to learn from scholarship and artistic practice ways to imagine water beyond a mere resource and acquire tools to critically reflect upon the present.

Schedule

Day 1
Morning
Introduction & theoretical framework

Afternoon
Writing exercise, preparation of cyanotype material & exhibition visit

Day 2
Morning
Field trip to Floating University & reading session

Afternoon
Research session: water in artistic practice

Day 3
Morning
Artistic practice session at a Berlin lake: creative underwater writing & cyanotype making

Afternoon
Project presentation & wrap up

Equipment requirements:
Laptop, pen, pencil and notebook

Marie Aline Klinger is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of History and Theory of Visual Culture at Berlin University of the Arts. Her research and teaching focuses on water relations and the notion of leakiness and the fluid across aesthetic and political contexts. Her most recent essay Rote Fäden, leaky Körper (2025) discusses the politics of menstruation and the permeable body. In her 2024 essay Wasserprotokolle, she argues that water is never a pure force of nature but always entangled in political constellations. Marie Aline Klinger studied Media Studies and Cultural Theory and History in Weimar, Berlin, and Paris.

www.visuellekultur.udk-berlin.de/personen/marie-aline-klinger

Alicia Kremser is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on installation, site-specific works, and curatorial practice. After completing her Bachelor’s in Media Art at Bauhaus University Weimar, she continued to develop her artistic practice through a Master’s in Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice at St. Joost School of Art and Design in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. In 2021, Alicia Kremser initiated and co-curated the independent exhibition project 'I Believe You, I Believe In You', accompanied by a publication of the same name. Her work has been exhibited at the Musée La Boverie in Liège, the Stedelijk Museum in Breda, and at Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig. She lives and works in Cologne.

www.aliciakremser.de/en