Bodies of Water is a collective floating session unfolding in the Nieuwkoopse Plassen, centered around a soft inflatable woolen structure that exists somewhere between body, landscape, and temporary island. Participants are invited to enter the water together, drift, float, and attune to the porous relations between land, water, and the sensing body.
Date & location:
Saturday June 6, 14.00
Meijepad, Nieuwkoop
Context
The Nieuwkoopse Plassen is a living archive: a landscape shaped by peat extraction, flooding, and human hands, yet still moving with its own rhythms of reeds, rivers, and skies. Here, water holds memory—of bogs drained, plots carved, dikes raised, floods endured. It is both wound and lifeline, both human-made and more- than-human.
To float in these waters is to feel this history seep into the body, to sense our own fluid boundaries entangled with the shifting ground beneath. In droughts, floods, and contamination, the crises of water are written not only on the land but also within us. What happens here happens in us: porous beings caught in the same cycles of intake, exchange, and transformation.
To attune to this place is to remember: we are archives of water too—fragile, entangled, and inseparable from its fate.
Bodies of Water explores the concept of humans as “Bodies of Water”—a notion shaped by Astrida Neimanis—through the living archive of the Nieuwkoopse Plassen. Once vast peatlands, later carved and drained into an artificial lake system, this landscape holds centuries of negotiation between land, water, and human hands. Here, where mills turn, locks hold, and reeds whisper, participants are invited to attune to water as both a life-sustaining medium and a witness to transformation, extraction, and survival.
Drawing on posthuman and ecological frameworks, the project highlights how water dissolves boundaries between self and other. Floating within this site, participants will reflect on the fluidity of identity and the interconnectedness of all life, while also sensing the vulnerabilities of a landscape shaped by both natural rhythms and human interventions. The experience fosters a deeper ethical and sensory awareness of our embeddedness within water’s histories and futures.
Who Is This For?
For individuals interested in ecological thinking, embodied practices, and sensory exploration—anyone seeking to deepen their connection to water as both a relational force and a fragile, contested element of survival.
Artist website Anne Zarske
https://annezarske.com