Courses

Emilia Rigaud

Emilia Rigaud is a photographic artist who reflects on the fragility of life through analog photography and small-scale installations. Her style utilizes light that is at the same time hazy soft, but penetratingly bright, that resembles a captivating daydream that sets above the spaces and people in her photos. Rigaud strives to find the ethereal in the every day, as she creates photographs in which time ceases to exist for a small moment - before inexorably disappearing to the past. Her work has been published FUTURES Photography (2023), PhotoIreland Festival (2020-2022), Emerge Magazine(2021), District Magazine (2020), and PhotoVogue (Portfolio 2020).

As bodies of water, we are all in this together, but we are not all the same, nor are we all in this in the same way. Water, the basis of life, constitutes over 80% of the human body; about the same percentage of the earth’s surface is wet and blue. Water interconnects us with all organic and inorganic matter on this planet in constant circulation during which it goes in and out, blurring boundaries. As if each living creature, each cell was an island in an endless sea that inevitably links us all. However, in the concept of hydrofeminism, there is a mutual connection not only between people but also between other “bodies of water” including other organisms, rivers as well as global circulation systems. This idea insists that we relinquish any lingering illusion of nature as separate from culture, or of humans as separate from the world around us, everything is somehow interconnected. This relationship raises the question of ethics and our relationship to planetary fluids, that are in crisis.

On a geological scale, we all came out of the same primordial soup, gestated by watery species, from a watery womb to a watery world, this makes the body the most immediate cultural location of water. With this fluid connection between humans and nonhuman, through our waters, we have to consider first what it means to be a body, especially when it’s mainly constituted from waters that also make up the planet. And how might this interdependency ask us to reconsider what’s at stake in the various water crises that our planet currently faces? Water flows through bodies, species, and materialities, connecting them for better or worse. For us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. In these waters is a call to consider our ethical responsibility towards the many other bodies of water we are becoming all the time.

All of the water that ever was on this planet is still here, this forces us to understand the “always time” of water, even in its circulations of difference and repetition, is also to consider what water remembers. The idea of embodied thinking and embodiment, in general, is not simply about asking what a watery body is, but also about its location, time, space, and context of it. Why is it? Where and when does that body cease to exist? And in what ways does it repeat itself? It is biological and cultural, and it is never only one thing, in only one place, or only ‘itself’. This connection to bodily materially and fluids points directly to environmental concerns. Not as external problems and challenges, but something we all embody if we have waters within ourselves.

Water is an embodiment of environmental materiality, it is a planetary habitat and boundary, giving life to us all. There is a direct link from a watery womb to a watery world. Descriptions and definitions of waters are primarily feminine and maternal. In the french language, the word for sea (mer) and mother (mère) is pronounced in the same way, making to connection obvious. Water is a life-giving liquid to all species, creating an intense dependency, everyone’s breastmilk. These fluid challenges, ask us to reimagine water, thus reimagine our bodies and all of the connections between them. Changing how we think about bodies, will change how we think about water and our embodied relation to it.

“The water we drink and touch is the same water that erupted as a stream at the origins of the earth. All of the moments of the past have this same water as their witness.” Janine MacLeod

Bodies of Water

Water is an embodiment of environmental materiality, it is a planetary habitat and boundary, giving life to us all. There is a direct link from a watery womb to a watery world. Descriptions and definitions of waters are primarily feminine and maternal. In the french language, the word for sea (mer) and mother (mère) is pronounced in the same way, making to connection obvious. Water is a life-giving liquid to all species, creating an intense dependency, it is everyone's breast milk. Changing how we think about our bodies, will change how we think about water and thus our embodied relation to it. This fluidic challenge, asks us to reimagine water, thus reimagining our bodies and all of the connections between them.