‘Wet Dreams’ addresses water beyond its understanding as a resource, exploring its role as a catalyst in eco-social relations. The exhibition highlights design practices that embrace decolonial, cuir and hydro-feminist approaches, emphasizing forms of embodiment, solidarity and desire in relation to bodies of water and fluid matter.
‘Wet Dreams’ speaks of waters that heal, of toxic and waste waters, of bodily fluids. It invites rain, rivers, reservoirs and mud. It conjures up sewers, stopcocks, conduits hidden behind walls, in cellars and under ceilings. It invokes the world of hoses and pipes. And the orifices that allow the liquids that soak our worlds to enter, as well as the occasional leaks, drips and overflows of the repressed.
The exhibition is structured around the following practices:
- Emanations and Soakings: on ritual architectures built around medicinal and healing waters that spring from the depths of the earth, emphasising the relationship between the health of our bodies and that of the planet.
- Rain and Other Discharges: The design of formulas to invoke rain and the fertility of the land.
- Overflows of the Repressed: on actions to liberate water bodies and dismantle the controlling ambitions of modern infrastructure projects.
- Orifices and Shared Fluids: on the use of bodily secretions as design materials.
- Pressure Valves and Overflowing Pipes: on how usually hidden elements such as pipes and valves are in fact an essential part of the architectures of the liquid, aqueous and climatic.
- Leaks and Hedonistic Waste: on design practices related to the residual, the toxic and the stinky, resulting in new material vibrations, sensations and spaces of enjoyment.
- Sensorial Prosthesis: on devices that connect bodies to multi-scalar climatic processes.
Curated by Marina Otero Verzier, Wet Dreams is the result of a collaboration between CentroCentro and MAYRIT, the Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture directed by Miguel Leiro.
