It would be too easy of a cliché to say we live in stormy times; where the activities of humanity have imbricated themselves and forever changed natural landscapes and processes. Therefore, to think about any solutions to the complex ecological crisis humanity faces must focus on approaches that favour intersectionality and transdisciplinarity. Design today needs to be looked at from a posthumanist imagination that emphasises not only human-built infrastructures but the existence and entwinement of the non-humans in our ecosystems; to acknowledge that the earth, water, flora and fauna are not just resources but actants within the world we inhabit. Take the city of Madrid for instance, where the exhibition Wet Dreams, curated by architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier—as the result of a collaboration between CentroCentro and MAYRIT, the Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture—is being showcased.

For around three years, Madrid and Spain overall have been experiencing a state of drought, the result of unnaturally high temperatures due to heat waves in 2023, and almost three years of reduced rainfall. Reservoirs in the country are running low and if conditions persist, studies predict that more than half of the country risks desertification in this century. If the linear and individualist narrative of modernism and progress have exacerbated the state of crisis, we need new imaginations to tackle such problems, as Donna Haraway suggests, we need to stay with the trouble, “be truly present…as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

A reference for the exhibition at CentroCentro was Astrida Neimanis’ text Bodies of Water (2012) in which she argues that our bodies are “hybrid assemblages”, allowing a “[reimagination of] embodiment from the perspective of our bodies’ wet constitution, [making it] inseparable from these pressing ecological questions.” In short, there can be no future that depends on individual or purely anthropocentric perspectives. Based on this idea, showcased works in the design exhibition hope to ask viewers to consider water as “more than a resource to consume or store,” and instead rethink it as a catalyst in eco-social relationships. Practices and projects on display emphasise the importance of water, highlighting how it is instrumental in creating bonds of solidarity, embodiment, and even desire as the exhibition title suggests.

The current showcase is a continuation of the research developed for the 13^th Shanghai Biennale, which was curated by architect, researcher, and writer Andrés Jaque alongside a curatorial team comprising Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and Mi You. As with the exhibit at Shanghai, the curation in Madrid is an attempt to consider new forms of collectivity through the medium of wateriness. A critique of the Shanghai Biennale, which was staged in 2021, was that this abstract idea of “wet-togetherness” put forth by the curatorial bent seemed to discount the current state of the world, more globalised and yet more closed off than ever, due to the pandemic and growing nationalist tendencies. Instead, by focusing on site-specific artworks and projects, it wanted to demonstrate “an understanding of embodiment as both a politics of location, where one’s specific situatedness is acknowledged, and as simultaneously partaking in a hydrocommons of wet relations. I call this a posthuman politics of location,” as Neimanis writes in her text. This, of course, does not discount the messiness of socio-political relationships, often a critique for such thinking.

However, it’s also worth considering the messiness of our involvement with the world, exceeding the boundaries of bodies and offering points of connection between organisms. The showcase in bringing this to the fore, puts on display archival research and design interventions that show not only how we contain and control water, but also how water is an entity that transgresses, and that cannot be controlled. Wet Dreams underscores the responsibility of designers and architects to question current ways of life and the values that guide them, where design becomes a “desire machine” for decolonial, queer, and hydrofeminist approaches to talk of the possibilities of water, allowing it to leak, drip, flow into, and soak our reality and reveal worlds beyond our human selves.

Bringing together around 30 designers and contemporary artists, the line-up is divided into seven sections, each focusing on different aspects of the fluid, and highlighting spaces, material processes, and aesthetics that advocate for forms of togetherness, mediated by water and fluid matter such as the projects in the section ‘Emanations and Soakings’ which deals with the ritualistic connotations of water, and the infrastructures and myths built to support this idea. For instance, in Rivière de Plata. Mitologías hidráulicas del desarrollismo español (River of silver. Hydraulic mythologies of Spanish developmentalism) (2024), Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, a Madrid and New York-based architect showcases a puppet show that comments on how the therapeutic properties of water are often exploited to encourage tourism and hence fasten large urban developments in certain regions. The show was inspired by Luis García Berlanga’s film, Los Jueves, Milagro (1957) and follows the adventures of two tourists, a hotel manager, a real estate developer and scientists around the waters of a seawater spa in the Spanish Levante region. The project shows how mythologies of water play a role in furthering certain developments while questioning if these are beneficial.

While the cleansing rituals commonly foreground water, many indigenous rituals also centre around precipitation and the monsoon. This is highlighted by the ‘Rain and Other Discharges’ section. Here, the project China’s Sky River by designers and researchers Marco Ferrari and Elise Misao Hunchuck presents a recreation of a cloud seeding cannon to demonstrate the Chinese government’s ongoing plan to develop the largest cloud seeding project in the world. This project, which aims to control nature is being overseen by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Through its inclusion in the exhibit, the project aims to trace some of the political, ecological, and social consequences of mining the commons of the atmosphere, while also presciently commenting on the current drought in Spain.

On the other hand, some design practices openly highlight the political and ecological implications of man-made hydrological infrastructures such as the ones in the section ‘Hedonistic Leaks and Waste’ which focuses on “the residual, the toxic and the foul-smelling” or ‘Overflows of the Repressed’ which foregrounds histories of how nature often dismantles the confinements and ambitions of modern infrastructure projects. Alluding to the messy, turbulent nature of water, Quedó en agua de borrajas (what remains of borage water) by designers Elsa Casanova Sampé and Ana Robles Pérez, focuses on the environmental disaster of the Riaño reservoir which flooded nine towns in 1987, erasing their land and history. The project documents this moment, with photography showing the people of the community on rooftops, unwilling to leave while their town was flooded to create a dam, highlighting a sense of solidarity and the costs of such massive infrastructure projects.

Similarly, in Tanks and Storms (Tanques y tormentas), a model by the Institute for Postnatural Studies, reflects on tunnels, sewers and tanks that ensure that the toxins from the environment don’t end up in the river Manzanares in Madrid, instead filtering them into the subsoil. By bringing out the vast infrastructure that ensures toxins don’t enter this river, it creates a new ecosystem that connects us not only to the river but also the atmosphere.

Further showcasing this hidden network of tanks, valves and pipes is the section ‘Pressure Valves and Overflowing Pipes’ which focuses on these normally hidden elements, that are a fundamental part of architecture. Plumbing the thread that runs through the showcase which is this idea of eco-social relationships and water, the project A Night at the Baths. Fluid Politics Before the AIDS Crisis (2022-2024) by Spanish architect Pol Esteve Castelló looks at the queer community in 1970s New York. During this period, the city saw the flourishing of spaces for the queer community which mixed bathing, sex, and socialising. These included swimming pools, saunas, or Turkish baths, and were spaces where fluids circulated without restriction before the arrival of the AIDS crisis. Through the project, Castelló draws attention to this idea of fluid exchange as liberating while dangerous, and how architecture and design played a crucial role in this, further showing the politics of fluidity. Another of Castelló’s projects, Pipe Life/m². “Architectures Dangereuses” at the Turn of the Millenium (2019-2023) goes into the same details but with the case study of Le Depot in Paris, considered one of Europe’s biggest sex clubs during the 80s.

One of the only actual design interventions showcased in the exhibition space that tries to act as a solution to the water crisis is Rambla Climate-House (2021) by Spanish architecture studio Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation. The experimental project works to revive and sustain the biodiversity of Molina de Segura (Murcia) which experienced urban development that flattened the terrain and destroyed its ravine ecosystem. Termed by the designers as “a climatic and ecological device,” it collects rainwater and greywater and then sprays it over the ravine. By using rainwater, it rejuvenates the natural landscape attracting and fostering indigenous plants and animals. The exhibition includes plans and models of the house.

While most projects focus on large-scale interventions and consequences, two sections bring attention to the bodily, where some designers work with water as co-design material such as the design for Symbiopunk (2021) by Rebecca Schedler, which is a device that turns faecal matter into fertile humus presented in the section ‘Orifices and Shared Fluids’. Conversely, projects in ‘Sensorial Prosthesis’ present a series of devices that connect bodies to multi-scale climatic processes. For instance, the interactive artwork by Germany-based designer Jan Christian Schulz, Prosthetic Sensorium. The device is meant to be a prosthetic listening apparatus that helps the body sense ecosystemic changes. Using data tangibility methodologies, piezoelectric vibration sensors, and microphones, the inflatable transmitter station facilitates embodied knowledge of water ecosystems by allowing visitors to tune into minute fluctuations of the climate all over the world.

While each project on display in the exhibition which is on till August 25, 2024, brings a different perspective on water and fluidity to the fore, it allows visitors to reflect on outdated visions of progress and what results from the anthropocentric desire to control and exploit natural landscapes and territories, imaginations that must wither in the quagmire of climate catastrophe and ecological disaster.

The exhibition 'Wet Dreams' at CentroCentro in Madrid, runs from March 9 to August 25, 2024.