Patti Anahory

Staying with Water: Infrastructural Practices of Belonging

Talk
In the talk, Anahory will share reflections on her architectural practice, engaging with multiple dimensions of water to explore the entanglement of colonial continuities embedded in spatial narratives. The talk invites us to think with water as a relational field, moving from an understanding of water as resource or commodity towards water as an emotional, ancestral, cultural, (infra)structural and critical lens – as archive, portal, and kin.

Workshop
Participants are invited to bring an object, photograph, drawing, text or story connected to a body of water that has shaped them — a river, a coast, a reservoir, a pipe, a flood. These become prompts for collectively mapping the relationships, memories and entangled histories that run between us and across geographies.
Working outward from the Ruhr's own water infrastructures — the Emscher, the mine water that must be pumped in perpetuity — and from the Atlantic geographies of Cabo Verde and the Black Atlantic, we will ask what it means to think with water rather than about it, and what forms of knowledge such thinking makes possible. The aim is not to settle on a method but to practise one: a way of holding planetary questions through situated, material, shared accounts, and of attending to water as archive and relation rather than resource.

Talk
In the talk, Anahory will share reflections on her architectural practice, engaging with multiple dimensions of water to explore the entanglement of colonial continuities embedded in spatial narratives. The talk invites us to think with water as a relational field, moving from an understanding of water as resource or commodity towards water as an emotional, ancestral, cultural, (infra)structural and critical lens – as archive, portal, and kin.

Workshop
Participants are invited to bring an object, photograph, drawing, text or story connected to a body of water that has shaped them — a river, a coast, a reservoir, a pipe, a flood. These become prompts for collectively mapping the relationships, memories and entangled histories that run between us and across geographies.
Working outward from the Ruhr's own water infrastructures — the Emscher, the mine water that must be pumped in perpetuity — and from the Atlantic geographies of Cabo Verde and the Black Atlantic, we will ask what it means to think with water rather than about it, and what forms of knowledge such thinking makes possible. The aim is not to settle on a method but to practise one: a way of holding planetary questions through situated, material, shared accounts, and of attending to water as archive and relation rather than resource.