Dates:
Sun, 13 Sept 2026, 11:00–15:00
Negotiating with Water is a conference programme dedicated to our water imaginaries, and their legal and geopolitical realities and possibilities. The day frames water as a symptom of the socio-political context and a witness to different forms of human activities. Through the gaze of capital, water is a resource, a commodity we negotiate the rights to; at the same time, water carries traces of military, logistic or commercial activity.
Current water imaginaries have led to our thirsty, expansion-driven culture becoming the site of multiple water-related crises—from the persistent freshwater crisis to more recent geopolitical dynamics that have highlighted the importance of bodies of water for global trade and military action.
To frame water as a product of socio-political and cultural imaginaries is to also reframe water crises as cultural. It means to ask not only what water imaginaries might be possible under different conditions, but also what innovation and legal frameworks they would allow; it means breaking with the history of water told only in scientific, techno-managerial or colonial terms.
Throughout the conference day, artists, theorists, indigenous thinkers and legal experts complicate the existing notion of water and think with water to reimagine hydro-social relations across different scales. The conference examines our fraught relation to water that has led to the multiple crises of our time and suggests its rerouting towards a more fluid one in which we continuously negotiate with others, and most importantly, with water itself.
Categories: Conference
Source: Event information supplied by Source: Ars Electronica Festival 2026; formatted by LocFeed..