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Some say water never forgets. It carries what we’ve lost and what we’ve made: salt, memory, waste, desire, circling through us and the world without end. Standing before the online exhibition You Were Never Solid, I keep thinking of that: the quiet, relentless return of what flows.
Hosted on common-garden, the artist-led platform by Constant Dullaart, You Were Never Solid brings together a constellation of digital artists exploring what it means to be fluid in a world obsessed with solidity. Co-curated by Anika Meier (The Second-Guess) and me, the exhibition will also take physical form at DANAE (Paris) with a Champagne Breakfast on 23 October, 9–11am CET, featuring artists CROSSLUCID, Lauren Moffatt, Sasha Katz, BORA, and SOFF.
→ Register here
You Were Never Solid unfolds through four rooms: from Fluid Origins and Tides of Loss, to Ritual Currents and Hybrid Ecologies. Each room is a passage into liquidity, where digital artworks dissolve the old distinctions between nature and technology, self and other, and grief and renewal. The show brings together works that imagine water not as a backdrop but as a collaborator and world-builder.
As explained by the author and philosopher Astrida Neimanis in her book Bodies of Water (2017), hydrofeminism is a concept that invites us to see ourselves not as isolated beings but as oceanic entities. Our cells, moods, and technologies all circulate within the same planetary currents.
“These various bodily interfaces—biology and mood and culture and context—are always co-worlding the phenomenon we come to know as our bodies,” Neimanis writes.
The idea reframes feminism not as identity politics but as a theoretical framework to consider our relationship with water differently. She uses a methodology of relation to human and more-than-human to challenge the dry logic of separation. It reminds us, as Luce Irigaray put it, that “the first ecological gesture is to live and situate ourselves as living beings among other living beings.”
Through the show, the female perspective and body are staged as spaces of birth, creation, fluidity, and cycles, where place and time are entangled into matter.
This current flows through the exhibition’s first room, Fluid Origins, where artists imagine beginnings not as singular points but as cycles of emergence. Claudia Hart’s Dream evokes the slow pulse of life seen under the skin, a cellular, digital meditation on embodiment. Connie Bakshi’s Bone of My Bones merges Chinese and Abrahamic myths with a machine searching for its origins from water and code. And in Pinar Yoldas’ Aquagirl, a marine goddess surfaces as a mythic figure of care, a hydrofeminist guardian of the sea whose body refuses containment.
As Astride Neimanis repeats in her book, “water is a planetary archive.” Every molecule we drink has passed through billions of bodies, human, animal, mineral. It remembers migrations, colonizations, and poisons; it holds histories that have been erased from land.
This idea is present throughout the exhibition. In CROSSLUCID’s Synthetic Mournings, AI-generated voices drift like currents, mourning both human trauma and algorithmic memory. Sasha Katz’s Saltwater turns grief into an ocean made of tears. And in Wednesday Kim’s Genealogy of Traces, digital ghosts rise from discarded data, recalling the Korean Dokkaebi who emerge from forgotten objects.
Each work highlights water as a key player in remembering what the system tries to erase. In the digital realm, water is this hero that reclaims memories.
But water is also a place of rituals, of transformation, of connection. Across the show, artists see water as a space for ceremony, rebirth, and trans-species kinship.
In SOFF’s Conversations Between Water, the viewer is invited into dialogue with sentient waves, a quiet exchange of resonance rather than speech. BORA Murmure’s Birth Tale One: Remember turns birth into a queer, aquatic ritual, where breath, vulnerability, and transformation merge. And Kira Xonorika’s Ore/Us, rooted in Guaraní cosmology, restores water as sacred, not as a resource to be owned, but as a relation to be honored.
And in Violet Bond’s Spore and She Had Mud for Blood, the wet season of Northern Australia becomes a site of renewal and decay, where water and mud collaborate in the endless cycle of growth and disappearance.
In the final step of the exhibition, nature and technology form a new metabolism. Water becomes an agent of speculative evolution.
In Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’ Second Nature, plants metabolize data through water instead of sunlight, revealing a hybrid nature-technology ecosystem. Dagmar Schürrer’s Symbiosis / Neural Synchrony imagines avatars syncing with microbial life, suggesting that consciousness, too, might be shared.
Lauren Moffatt’s Chorcorallium submerges us in a coral reef that grows from human remnants of offshore wind farms. In Harriet Davey’s Drip Fed, a being made from digital waste drifts between solid and liquid states. And in Viola Rama’s HYDROSKIN AR1, speculative survival kits for a climate-collapsed world imagine hybrid female bodies designed to adapt and endure in water-saturated futures.
The Politics of Water
To see through water is to see relationally and that nothing is ever “pure” or siloed. Every drop is shared.
As Astrida Neimanis writes, nursing is a material expression of our planetary entanglement, where politics, ecology, and biology flow through one another. Pollutants like DDT, PCBs, arsenic, and benzene travel like stories. They are carried by rivers, rain, and bodies, human and more-than-human. And, as Donna Haraway said, “Bodies are always natureculture.”
Hydrofeminism reminds us that the concept of individuality and "oneself" doesn't really exist. Everything is relational.
Don’t miss it:
You Were Never SolidCurated by Anika Meier (The Second-Guess) & Diane Drubay (Blueshift)Browse the exhibition catalogue.
→ Online exhibition: you-were-never-solid.common.garden
→ Champagne Breakfast at DANAE (Paris): Register here
🗓️ 23 October, 9–11am CET