WET DREAMS
General Info
- Location
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CentroCentro, Madrid
- Date
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03/03/2024 – 10/08/2024
- Typology
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Exhibition
- Curated by
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Marina Otero Verzier
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, queer 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.
Exhibition view, CentroCentro
Tanks and Storms
During the first hour of rainfall, the water entering Madrid’s sewer system carries more pollutants than the black or wastewater from an entire residential building. These toxins—largely the result of air pollution—are commonly referred to as Madrid’s “boina” (or “beret”). Stormwater tanks, vast underground infrastructures that form part of the city's sanitation system, are responsible for preventing these rain-swept particles from ending up in rivers—such as the shallow Manzanares. The delicate coexistence between urban inhabitants and the city’s fragile fluvial ecosystem continues thanks to these invisible networks of tunnels, collectors, and reservoirs, whose scale aligns more closely with that of a planetary organ than with any human-scale system.
Tanks and storms: Underground water infrastructures
Stormtank at Arroyofresno, Madrid
This research project, presented by the Institute for Postnatural Studies as part of the exhibition Wet Dreams, uses eco-fiction as a tool to reveal the inner workings of this hidden infrastructure.
Set in a near and plausible future (year 2185), the fictional narrative follows a space explorer arriving at the site of the Arroyofresno Stormwater Tank in search of a possible 100 liters of water detected through volumetric measurement tools. Presented in an experimental format that simulates a transcription made by the explorer’s suit or spacecraft, the short story chronicles the arrival, descent, analysis, and outcome of this expedition—offering a speculative, poetic lens into the subterranean mechanisms that continue to mediate life in the city.
Credits
- WITH WORKS BY
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Yi-Fei Chen, Matilde Cassani, Elsa Casanova Sampé, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Patricia Coelho, elii [oficina de arquitectura], Mariam Elnozahy, Pol Esteve Castelló, Marco Ferrari, Ignacio G. Galán, Elise Hunchuck, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, María Jerez, La Cuarta Piel, Elena López Riera, Miguel Montoya, Ivan L. Munuera, Marc Navarro, Claudia Paredes, Philippe Rahm, Joel Sanders, Jan Christian Schulz, Rebecca Schedler, Ariadna Silva Fernández, Ana Robles Pérez, Serina Tarkhanian, Susan Schuppli.
- PARTNER
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Mayrit Biennal
- Graphic Design
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Víctor Clemente
- MUSEOGRAPHY
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Pablo Ferreira Navone
- CURATORIAL ASSITANCE
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Ana Robles Pérez
- With the support of
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Creative Industries Fund NL, Cultuur Eindhoven, Fundación María José Jove
- PHOTOS
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Alberto Omiste
