Body Concepts
Environmental Bodies

The Body Concepts series is based on the principle of transdisciplinary encounters. The session begins with a lecture by Nadia Cristidi, followed by a dialogue with artist Adam Man.
LECTURE BY NADIA CRISTIDI: In my talk Cyborg Watersheds, I consider conceptualizations of the city as a living body, ‘natural’ bodies, and water bodies from the fields of environmental history, geography, and political ecology. I draw in particular on the concepts of “infrastructure as archive” (Rahman and Boyle, 2021), which treats infrastructural landscapes as bodies progressively made and remade, and urban metabolism (Wolman 1965), which emphasizes the resources required to nourish a city and their flows from source to waste. I am interested in a specific type of infrastructural landscape that urban water metabolism produces - what artist Lauren Bon calls “cyborg watersheds” or watersheds thoroughly reshaped by infrastructures such that the natural and human-made in them are intertwined and together co-enable contemporary urban environments.
I discuss these concepts in relation to the embodied practice of walking and reading infrastructural landscapes and following resource flows that I have adopted in my work on, for instance, the freshwater aqueduct systems that feed Los Angeles and Dubai’s tapping of the Arabian Gulf sea for desalination. Such methods help me understand the metabolic reach of cities and their remaking of ‘nature’ beyond their bounds (Cronon 1991) as well as the nature of governance in them through its material impressions over time.
Link for livestream. Free admission. In English.
NADIA CHRISTIDI is an academic and arts practitioner. Her research explores how the future of water is being imagined and planned for in cities facing water supply challenges, which are intensifying with climate change, including Dubai and Los Angeles. Her work has been presented at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata, SALT Ulus, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Jameel Arts Centre, and Ocean Space, and will be included in the upcoming Sharjah Art Biennial. Nadia holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Governing through Design.
ADAM (aka Sandra) MAN is an artist working with live performance, video and text. Since 2017 he has been working mainly outdoors, on a new relationship between body and landscape. In his live performances the landscape becomes a common ground that connects participants and attenders. In his videos he shows dancers interacting with remote techno-natural landscapes: e.g. a former coal mining area, a power plant on a melting glacier, a wild river in an industrial zone. In his texts, Adam explores sensitive ways of describing what surrounds us. His trans-disciplinary work investigates our contemporary geo-existence on Earth. www.adamman.com
Image: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Cutting Across the Mojave Desert
Veranstaltungsort: Uferstudios | Studio 11 | Uferstr. 23 | 13357Berlin