msdm a nomadic house-studio-gallery for photographic art and curatorial research, an expanded practice of the artist's book, photobook publishing and peer-to-peer collaboration created by contemporary artist paula roush

liquid memories


Project, workshops 
+ editorial design:
paula roush

Photo-texts:
Maria João Ferreira
paula roush
Betina Dal Molin Juglair, Francisco Varela
Miguel Marecos
Joana Nascimento
David Goldenberg
Raul Simões Pinto,
NDMALO archive
Alice WR
Teresa Huertas
Carla Fragata
Manuela Matos Monteiro
Luís Carvalhal
Natércia Caneira
João de Goes
Inês R. Amado
Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro
Ana Botelho
Manuela Vaz
Renato Roque
Eliane Velozo
and Severino Iaba
Susana 
Paiva
Mide Plácido

Commissioning
curator: 
Francisco Varela


liquid memories ~to read with water (2022) is a collective photobook work,
an assemblage of experimental photo-texts that respond to the challenge
of photographing/remembering with water. 
A publication in 55 unbound sections 
Laser and Indigo print, edition of 100 copies
Total: 721 pages, 544 photographs

The publication takes its title from the liquid memories workshops,
in which participants experimented with  methodologies of ‘wateryquery’
developed out of artistic research with water;  
Step by step guided exercises were developed to figure bodies of water,
with a focusing moment of connection with the intricacy of watery memories.
The words ‘water’ and  ‘enquiry’  form a new word that doesn’t feature
in standard dictionaries and suggests a felt sense of enquiring with water. 

The publication acts both as a collection of the twenty-three participating
artists responses and as a ‘user’s guide’ to the projects wateryquery
playful experiments.

Conceived as process-based, the project started with the “situated waters”
of the Douro River and Pasteleira reservoir park, in the city of Porto, Portugal.
This ecotone, a location in transition at the juncture of multiple living and non-living systems, offered a multi-scalar entry point into the relations between people and river.
The first bloc of works titled ‘WATER STATIONS’ was developed in the online workshop with a group of Porto-based artists and photographers. Water samples collected from a local water treatment plant, were used to soak the photographic collections, and unleash water’s own archival materialities. Inspired by the research of water visionaries, we explored the memory of water, life’s archiving medium, to appropriate and collage historical archives.
The second bloc of works titled ‘WATER STORIES’ was activated through a mass zoom live editing lab and open call for further collaborations. This was an online workshop cum networked performance, staging the ‘water stations’ (capture, organic, suspended, mud, deep mud, rough) in six breakout rooms, with the addition of a 7th station for participatory tools.


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contact

paula roush   :::   paularoush@gmail.com
msdm studio :::      msdm@msdm.org.uk