liquid memories

Liquid Memories

Water as an epistemic system

Water / River Ecologies / Diffraction / Participation / Publishing

Liquid Memories is a residency-based research project that approaches water as an epistemic system rather than a subject of representation. Working with rivers, infrastructures, and local communities, the project explores how water shapes memory, movement, and knowledge across scales.

Drawing on diffractive methodologies, participatory laboratories, and publishing as practice, Liquid Memories foregrounds processes of flow, permeability, and transformation. Images and texts emerge through encounters with water as material force — reflecting, dissolving, and reconfiguring forms of knowing.

The project positions publishing not as documentation, but as a fluid method for assembling collective, situated, and provisional knowledge.

Project unfolding

Conceived as a process-based project, Liquid Memories unfolded through a two-part residency exploring the contact zone between water, photography, and publishing. The project engages bodies of water as living archives that embody histories, cultures, and ecological transformations.

Liquid Memories began with the situated waters of the Douro River and the Pasteleira reservoir park, in Porto, Portugal. The first block of works, Water Stations, was developed through a workshop with a group of Porto-based artists and photographers. Water samples collected from a local water treatment plant were used to soak photographic collections, activating water’s archival materialities. This process foregrounded water’s role in shaping collective memory while revealing its capacity to transform photographic images and narratives.

The second block of works, Water Stories, was activated through a mass Zoom live editing lab and an open call for further collaborations. This phase extended the project beyond Porto to include waters from Iceland, the Atlantic Ocean, the Azores archipelago, Africa, and Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The project thus opened a distributed dialogue on water across different cultural, geographic, and ecological contexts.

Methodology: Wateryquery

Participants in Liquid Memories experimented with methodologies of wateryquery, developed through artistic research with water. Step by step, guided exercises were designed to figure bodies of water through moments of attention, contact, and memory.

The term wateryquery — a compound of water and enquiry — describes a felt mode of researching with water rather than about it. It proposes an intuitive, relational approach that exceeds conventional research methodologies and invites attunement to water’s temporalities, agencies, and affects.

From Practice to Manifesto

Liquid Memories constitutes a key site in which the principles later articulated in the msdm manifesto are materially tested: slowness as method, publishing as process, and mediation as a relational practice shaped by more-than-human agencies. Working with water as collaborator and epistemic force, the project enacts forms of situated pedagogy, collective authorship, and fluid publication that continue to inform msdm’s editorial and educational practices today.

→ Read the msdm manifesto

Forms / Outputs

Publications (Selected)
– Liquid Memories: To Read With Water (Collector’s Edition / Open-source Edition)
– Water Prints

Exhibitions & Installations (Selected)
– Liquid Memories, Borough Road Gallery, London
– Publishing as Watery Strategy, Imago Gallery, Lisbon
– Liquid Memory, Water Museum, Lisbon
– Memória Líquida, Casa da Imagem, Vila Nova de Gaia
– Trabalhos Líquidos & Jerricans, Cozinha Gallery, Porto

Workshops & Participatory Labs (Selected)
– Collective Publishing Practices, Borough Road Gallery, London
– Between Archive and Publication: A Liquid Workshop
– Liquid Workshop: Live Editorial Lab (Zoom)

Gatherings & Public Events (Selected)
– Waters of Change Archive Gathering
– Wateryquery, London Conference in Critical Thought
– The Photobook Club Lisbon
– Lisbon Photobook Fair

liquid memories ~to read with water
-collector's edition featuring the 55 sections
in an individually customised case
-Opensource edition free download
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