LIDA-ESAD.CR Leiria Polythecnic

This presentation presents fragments of a project in its initial stage, which invites us to contemplate the profound connection between humans and the natural world. It explores the idea of listening to a river, being moved by weather, and reweaving a sense of belonging across species, disciplines, and ways of knowing. The project being presented implies an artistic research journey along the Zêzere River catchment in Portugal. It approaches water as a complex, living system—material, affective, and generative—capable of shaping new imaginaries for coexistence rather than viewing water solely through ecological or political lenses. Water emerges as the subject and collaborator in this exploration. The presentation delves into how artistic practice can reshape our entangled relationships with the more-than-human realm through poetic, speculative, and site- responsive methods. This slow, embodied methodology involves long-distance walking, photography, video, sound collection, storytelling, and situated conversations, all intertwined with critical reflection. The proposal is a poetic ethnography—an attuned practice of being present in place. This project aims to be water, not about water. It presents a co-composed narrative where the river becomes a witness and a guide while the rain is an oracle for future realms. The project envisions a governance incorporating the voices of rivers and rain, management practices rooted in empathy, and biocultural heritages enacted as living practices of care, attention, and imagination. In dialogue with Sustainable Development Goals 6 and 13, this research offers not technical solutions but a re-enchantment—an expansion of our emotions, expressions, and relationships with water. These site-specific and embodied methods serve as tools to generate alternative forms of knowledge that resist extractivist and binary thinking. They invite us to reimagine sustainability not as control or efficiency but as a relationship, interdependence, and multispecies coexistence. This presentation invites us to speculate and embark on a journey of walking, feeling, and—above all— listening to the rain.