The Water Around Us
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The Water Around Us 〰️
Schiedam, The Netherlands
“It is precisely what is invisible in the land that makes what is merely empty space to one person, a place to another.”
“The task is to find ways of expressing the ‘invisible’ places and beings: the use-histories, imaginative shapes, natural forms, and cultural visions it had inspired, and the ways it had been written into language and memory. Once a landscape goes undescribed in our words, and therefore unregarded, it becomes more vulnerable to unwise use or improper action.”
I was genuinely surprised to see these wonderful, curious beings emerge from my underwater footage — shot right in the middle of a canal in Schiedam.
To enter water is to cross a border.
The water around us—where boats pass, amateurs fish, and kids leap in for a summer swim — is, for most people on most days, a void. A non-place. A space we pass over, not through. A place we feel no need to care for.
“When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore
land, forced to ‘stand on its own legs’, now carrying water on the inside, in
the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo.”
What you are looking at are our ancestors.
“We are rather fishy, we humans. We pretty much swam our way here, if noton the outside, then at least on the inside. We are all still, necessarily, treadingwater.... Our being asbodies of water has been facilitated by water – that is, by other bodies of waterthat have preceded us.”