Notes on Water: Fluid Potentialities of an Intermedial Metaphor

According to Gilles Deleuze, water scenes in film can foster the “promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception” (1986: 80). This event seeks to investigate water as a metaphor and the alternative perception it produces in visual cultural works.

Water has frequently been at the core of imaginaries and narratives, being a generative and productive metaphor, as highlighted by various scholars (Bachelard 1942; Boccaletti 2021; Mentz 2023; Starosielski 2012; Strang 2015). In particular, in recent years, water has occupied a central role in shaping new understandings of our engagement with the environment, our past, and our future. Many ecocritical, ecofeminist, and queer studies have embraced the metaphorical power of water, as it allows us to bridge the gap between the human and the nonhuman (Alaimo 2016; Chow 2023; Neimanis 2017). As Astrida Neimanis reminds us, our own wateriness implies that we “have never been (only) human” (2017: 2). Similarly, water is at the core of various Black studies texts, as scholars have explored its regenerative possibilities (Tinsley 2008; Phiri 2024).

This event will follow these footsteps, highlighting the need to explore water, in order to foster new ways of being and moving through the world, especially as we are witnessing the increasingly more dangerous consequences of climate change. By focusing on the symbolic and critical uses of water in various geocultural contexts (Latin America, Italy, and Scotland), we aim to reflect on how a single image has produced distinct meanings in different areas, how these interact with each other and flow into broader cultural narratives.

Speakers:

Alastair Cole is a documentary filmmaker and a senior lecturer in Film Practice at Newcastle University. His most recent feature length film, Iorram (Boat Song) (2021), was released in 50 cinemas across the UK and broadcast on the BBC. After premiering at the 2021 Glasgow Film Festival it screened at festivals internationally from Tallinn Black Nights to Vancouver, Darwin to Dinard - winning multiple awards. His previous feature length documentary Colours of the Alphabet screened at 50+ festivals globally, and was broadcast in 30 languages across 52 countries. His previous short and mid length films have also been broadcast in 27 countries and screened at festivals around the world. His films have also been the centre of UK and international impact campaigns with screenings at the UN, EU and Westminster, as well as at museums, galleries and in hundreds of community settings across the world. See www.tonguetiedfilms.co.uk for more on his work.

Magnus Course is Professor of Creative Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, and power. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics in 2005, and the ensuing monograph was published by University of Illinois Press in 2011 as Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile. A further monograph on Mapuche kinship, Mapuche Ñi Mongen was published in Chile by Editores Pehuen in 2017. He has subsequently worked on the intersection of fishing and Gaelic culture in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, leading to two films exploring the role of the sea in the Scottish Gaelic imagination: the award-winning short film Muir ar n-Aithreachean and the BBC/Creative Scotland funded feature-length television documentary Iorram, both with Alastair Cole. His most recent film (co-directed with Capucine Tournilhac and Rishabh Raghavan) is Santi Migranti, an exploration of a public arts activism project in Naples. His latest book, Three Ways to Fail: witch / clown / usurper has (finally) been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His current research is on the material and social traces of Purgatory throughout Europe for a book-length project provisionally entitled Leaving Purgatory: the afterlives of an afterlife.

Geoffrey Maguire is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American culture, with particular interests in queer theory, sexuality studies and ecocriticism. He is the author of The Politics of Postmemory (2017) and Bodies of Water (2024), as well as the co-editor of New Visions of Adolescence (2018).

Nicoz Balboa is an Italian visual artist and tattoo artist based in France. His artistic practice spans comics, tattooing, graphic journaling, pyrography and painting, using autobiographical narrative as a tool for exploration and storytelling. His work addresses issues of identity, sexuality and trans experience with a language that alternates between irony, vulnerability and provocation, interweaving elements of the LGBTQIA+ and transfeminist traditions. After studying at the Istituto Europeo di Design di Roma and at ESAG in Paris, Nicoz published several books and graphic novels. These include Born to Lose (Coconino Press, 2017), Play With Fire (Oblomov, 2020; translated into French in 2022 by the Ici-Même publishing house) and Transformer (Oblomov, 2023), which won the prestigious Yellow Kid as Best Book of the Year at Lucca Comics & Games 2023. He also collaborated with Linus magazine between 2020 and 2021. Since 2012 he has travelled the world as a tattoo artist, working in international studios such as Mystery Tattoo Club (Paris), Eight of Swords (New York), Salon Serpent (Amsterdam) and Turbo Zero (Rome). In 2020, he opened Strangeland in La Rochelle, a queer studio dedicated not only to tattooing, but also to exhibitions, events and art workshops. In the same year, he founded the Graphic Journal Club, a creative community that explores the expressive potential of the graphic journal through workshops and sharing sessions. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US, including BilBolBul in Bologna, Luisa Catucci Gallery in Berlin, MF Gallery in New York and Art's Factory in Paris. Some of his most significant exhibition projects include Drawing Ruined My Life, Mermtrans, Sleeping in a Binder and New Perimeter, in which visual narrative is intertwined with the telling of the trans experience, deconstructing stereotypes through an intimate and irreverent approach. Active on social media, he uses Patreon for Graphic Journal courses, YouTube to document his sketchbooks and Instagram to share his work and interact with the artistic and queer community.

"The Graphic Journal is a tool for personal expression that combines drawing, writing and reflection. It is a way of observing and narrating one's daily life, but also of exploring deep emotions and inner processes. In my workshops I propose playful and creative exercises inspired by art therapy and autobiographical narration. For me, the Graphic Journal has become a way of getting to know myself better, of dealing with anxieties, questions, scattered thoughts, and at the same time a space of freedom in which form does not matter: you can draw badly, write awkwardly, paste, scribble, mess up. It is the content that matters: that is where you find something real."

This event is organised by Dr Alice Parrinello and Dr Marco Ruggieri, and supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and The Society for Italian Studies.

Accessibility:

This event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact iash@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible.