Liminal Waters

Within the humanities and social sciences, speculative, post-humanist and new materialist approaches and forms of ecological thought have developed over the past several decades, which have questioned inherited assumptions about human exceptionalism and the separation of the natural and the social (and cultural), while exploring ways of thinking beyond the human and with the more-than-human, attending to the material, relational, embodied, and situated processes through which worlds are continually produced. This is not simply about finding better ways of grasping our contemporary predicament—shaped by mutating climate and scientific and technological developments that unsettle habitual categories and divisions—but also creating alternative concepts, imaginaries, and sensibilities, so that other modes of thought and being, other worlds might become possible.

The Liminal Waters project explores how contemporary art and curating participate in this endeavour. It brings together artists who work across visual art, performance, and multisensory installation, interweave technology, folklore, magical practices, speculative fiction, philosophical ideas, and scientific findings, engage with ecological and technological anxieties, and propose other visions, narratives, and encounters. The project also experiments with the potential of exhibition-making to facilitate non-habitual ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling, and relating, and to act as a collective exercise in reimagining and practising alternative realities in times of ecological uncertainty. It does so through methods of experimental role-play, fictional worldbuilding, and speculative design, which informed the curatorial approach, the collective development of the exhibition, and its mediation, extending worldbuilding to the visitors.

In its more conventional usage, worldbuilding refers to the construction of consistent, coherent, more or less detailed imaginary worlds with their own rules, geography, history, nature, cultures, languages, and other aspects, especially in works of speculative fiction, which has long provided a space for imagining and modelling other realities across different media. With certain exceptions, fictional worlds in mainstream culture are usually designed as backdrops or environments in which stories, experiences, or interactions are set. In the Liminal Waters project, however, worldbuilding was (and is) not aimed at constructing such worlds. It unfolded, and continues to unfold, as a collaborative and playful process of attunement and becoming-with the climate, fog, moisture, wind, forest, birds, and other actors and agencies of Švicarija, Rožnik, and the Ljubljana Basin, entangled in a process of material and symbolic transmutations, out of which a different ecological grammar may begin to take shape.

Through these embodied encounters, fragmentary outlines of a world of Liminal Waters started to emerge, then precipitated into artworks and the exhibition as a whole, where they are being further developed and transformed. As much as any world, Liminal Waters is a fiction, but fictions here are not separate from reality; rather, they are generative of it. Nor can their imaginative construction be considered a matter of solely human creativity. They emerge from material imagination, embodied, entangled, situated engagement, and lived experience. Rather than constructing environments for us to inhabit, worlds awaiting completion or discovery, or ever more detailed wholes expanding towards some predetermined horizon, worldbuilding here offers something more germinal or, better still, liminal. Not a beginning nor a threshold to be crossed but unstable, provisionally summoned features of an emerging unfamiliar world, only ever a temporary condensation. Perhaps “a kind of holding pattern—maintaining a minimum consistency—for points of collapse”, but one woven through an open-ended, collective, more-than-human practice that you, the visitors (or readers), also participate in.

Curator of the exhibition: Tjaša Pogačar