The Guild of Hydrosemiosis

The Guild of Hydrosemiosis

The Guild of Hydrosemiosis is a para-institution that explores different water bodies and hydro-social entanglements as dynamic agents of meaning-making. As an art/research collective, we problematise the material realities that are produced through capitalist and neoliberal hydrosemiotic logics (the particular ways of knowing and institutionalising water that position water bodies as individualised, passive, and powerless parts/consumers of water infrastructure) and imagine possibilities for (un)knowing and instituting otherwise. Diffracting academic, technoscientific, and institutionalised practices of hydrosemiosis through feminist, embodied, and speculative sensitivities, we ask what gestures of meaning-making matter in our (individual and collective) relations with water. MIRJAMI LANTTO KLEIN is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Water and Environmental Engineering at Aalto University, Finland. In her work, she explores material-semiotic processes within different watery realms. ISABEL VAL SÁNCHEZ is an artist and cultural organizer working across mediums with a special interest in sound, image, writing, and radio art. She independently researches what amplifies human sensorial and affective abilities, looking into the subtle connections among past and present; inner, outer and other worlds.