The Century of Water — In Practice: The Official University of Chicago Arts Blog

UChicago Arts is committed to the health and safety of everyone at UChicago. Therefore, the performances mentioned below have been canceled as a preventative action against the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19). However, we will still seek to honor the work of our arts faculty, students, and staff during this time through our work on In Practice. We hope you enjoy the article below.

By Lee Jasperse, Arts, Science + Culture Initiative Graduate Fellow Manager

Speculative fiction from Waterworld to Mad Max has foretold for decades that the 21st century is the century of water. These predictions have been borne out in modern problems from sea level rise to adequate access to fresh water, influencing ecology, governance, economics, and human rights. The evolving importance of water is shaping UChicago too, as it increasingly becomes a central site of research across the university’s array of disciplines from the arts to the sciences. Scientists and engineers are focused on developing new filtration technologies to make water potable, methods for mapping underground water movement, and technologies to improve urban water management. Meanwhile, social scientists and economists are researching the privatization of clean water, human rights claims to water access, and interventions related to water governance. Humanists and artists are excavating the cultural and philosophical significance of water as a site people have turned to—in ancient times and in the present day—to think through emotion, spirituality, and world creation and restoration.

“The Water Project: Research and Cultural Production,” a University-wide program established by the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative (ASCI), intends to amplify the discourse around water-related concerns by bringing together natural and social scientists, humanists, students, curators, community members, and artists.

“The objective is to bring together what’s already happening across disciplines and to elevate it into the robust conversation that it should be on this campus,” ASCI director Julie Marie Lemon says. “The more you talk to people on this campus, the more you realize there are artists, people in environmental law, in molecular engineering—in every corner of campus—working on water.”

Lemon, an artist and curator by training, was inspired to create the Water Project in 2018 when she noticed artists increasingly using water as a subject and political metaphor in their works. Intrigued, she traced the currents beyond artmaking, discovering at least twenty-six UChicago-affiliated scientists and researchers working on water-related projects, from mobile filters that can “swim” through and detoxify contaminated waterways to models of climate change effects on freshwater wildlife. From there, Lemon’s list of “concerned” researchers grew rapidly across the social sciences and humanities and out into community organizations in the surrounding Chicago area.

In 2018 and 2019, Lemon hosted a series of roundtables, or “Water Tables,” with disciplinarily diverse groups of faculty members. These roundtables provided a forum for faculty from far-flung corners of the university to discuss common themes, as well as productive differences, that arise when working on water across disciplines.

With the Water Project, Lemon hopes to bring together coursework, performances, exhibitions, commissioned artworks, and film screenings to offer insights that might otherwise remain siloed in disciplinary obscurity. Using the insights gleaned through the Water Tables, the project aims to provide a more permanent infrastructure that can transform ongoing research into a campus-wide conversation and galvanize future work that takes water’s multifaceted character seriously.

With Lemon’s efforts, the College has assembled a faculty steering committee to develop specifically water-related curricula and research opportunities for undergraduate students. The College’s Summer Institute this year will examine “the place of water” in human civilizations past, present, and future.

Install view of Gyres 1-3, Whitney Museum of American Art — Install view of *Gyres 1-3*, Whitney Museum of American Art

Lemon envisions the Water Project making waves beyond curriculum. In early April, the Project will host its first artist talk with Stockholm-based Ellie Ga, whose practice incorporates climatological, documentary, and archival research to tell stories about life in precarious environments. She will screen and discuss her 2019 work Gyres 1-3, which narrates the stories of oceanic debris to consider “how flotsam can speak of what is left and what resurfaces time and time again.”

Additionally, the Project is in the process of organizing a series of Wunderkammer, or “cabinets of curiosities.” Each Wunderkammer will focus on a different form of water: oceans, rivers, reservoirs, and migrations. At each, scientists, humanists, and art practitioners will present some of their recent work and have a public conversation about the issues provoked by the intersection of each participant’s “curiosities.” By combining these channels into one initiative, Lemon hopes that the Water Project will help UChicago chart a course through this century’s water problems.