Futuring Waters

Artist: Jenny Marketou

Commissioned by 2023 – Eleusis European Capital of Culture

Curatorial advisor: Eleni Riga

Views at Anapsiktirion &  Vlyxa. Photos by the artist.

From May 29 to June 28, 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture and the international artist and educator Jenny Marketou organize Mystery 42 Futuring Waters, a series of public interdisciplinary and interartistic gatherings (workshops, lectures, performances, podcasts, site visits, etc.) which will contribute to the creation of a manifesto for the rights of the waters in Elefsina exploring potential socio-ecological futures. “A Speculative Manifesto Claiming the Water Rights for Elefsina” will be presented between September 15 and October 2, within the framework of Ecoculture Festival and will be accompanied by an exhibition as well as a special printed edition.

Jenny Marketou transforms the Canteen art hub on the waterfront of Elefsina into a Wet Lab with the help of Greek and international scientists, artists, curators, architects, archaeologists, activists
and active citizens of Elefsina, among others. Through this original convergence of co-creators, Marketou attempts to propose solutions to ecological issues, to raise awareness and to re-imagine the waters of Elefsina in an era of intense climatic and social change. It is a complex exercise of co-authorship in which the local community and especially young people have an active role. Mystery 42 Futuring Waters is part of Jenny Marketou’s year-long interdisciplinary research that examines ways of dealing with climate change, which is linked to abusive human interventions in the environment.

After careful research and a combination of art and design, Marketou creates sculptural ecosystems that give access to clean water using oysters as raw material. In addition, oysters provide food for human and non-human organisms and act as a powerful metaphor for redefining both environmental and social justice. Marketou works internationally on the aforementioned issues concerning the wider field of “hydropolitics”, a complex political thought around water. Her artistic practice is exemplified by her collaboration with scientists, activists, academics and boat builders as part of The Billion Oyster Project and the Swale Lab on Governors Island in New York, where she lives and works. Thus, during Mystery 42 Futuring Waters, Marketou will transmit the knowledge, methods and techniques she has acquired in her long-term artistic research, enriching and creating new collaborative methods of knowledge production that respond to the increased needs of asserting water rights in Elefsina.The first part of the Futuring Waters modular project process consists of three thematic gatherings that contribute to the creation of the manifesto:

Meeting 1 Feminist subjectivity, watered: Liquid Communities in the Making May 29 – 31, June 1 – 2 & 13, 2023
The first gathering in the process of mapping the “hydroscene”, under the title “Feminist subjectivity, watered: Liquid Communities in the Making”, with the invited curators Blanca de la Torre, Eleni Riga and artists Joulia Strauss and Jenny Marketou, focuses on an amalgam of ecological and feminist approaches using fictional and ritualistic tools to reimagine the interdependent relationships between bodies of water and the ways we deal with ecological grief.

Meeting 2
Hydropolitics: Water Sovereignty, the Imaginary and Gaiapolitics
June 7 – 10, 2023

The second meeting entitled “Hydropolitics: Water Sovereignty, the Imaginary and Gaiapolitics”, with curator Denis Maksimov-Gupta and the contribution of the artist and educator Jenis Marketou is an attempt reclaim of the epic work of Hesiod’s Theogony, a long composition around the Cosmogony putting the water element at the center. This new narrative process urges us to perceive water as an active agent in shaping public engagement and public space.

Meeting 3
Thallasotopies: Between the Wet/Dry Divide; Regeneration, Transformation, Purification,
Biodiversity
June 15 – 17, 18, 20, 22, 23 – 25, 26 – 27 & 28, 2023
The third encounter, “Thallasotopies: Between the Wet/Dry Divide; Regeneration, Transformation, Purification, Biodiversity”, which will equally inform the manifesto involves co-creators from the
fields of art, science, archeology and architecture (Nicolas Anastasopoulos, Angela YT Chan, Dimitra Ioannou, Ariana Kalliga, Jenny Marketou, Panagis Marketos, Michael Skoullos, Tatiana Theodoropoulou). In this gathering, the participants will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves and enrich the theoretical and practical existing knowledge tools through the local perspectives and lived experiences of the coastal city of Elefsina. Here, marine biology, zooarchaeology, mapping and surveillance technologies are organically combined with poetry and the creation of sculptures with oysters.

A Speculative Manifesto Claiming the Water Rights for Elefsina
2 The aforementioned gatherings reflect the rich historical, scientific and cultural role of the waters of Elefsina and form a spirit that moves away from the anthropocentric view of the world by favoring a network of relationships of fluid and hybrid harmonious coexistence. In the second part of the project, Marketou draws inspiration from the constitutions of some countries that already attribute legal rights to Nature such as Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), as well as the legal rights of the Whanganui rivers in New Zealand and Damodar in India and offers a new speculation situated at Elefsina that is inscribed in the global efforts to defend the personhood of nature and especially of water bodies. The manifesto, A Speculative Manifesto Claiming the Water Rights for Elefsina captures the results of a collective effort to design an active political space in Elefsina to ensure a sustainable and inclusive future, protect biodiversity, and the right of democratic access to clean water for all bodies of water.