Collaborative Practices Around Water, Transitory Materialities

Abstract

This critical text offers a description of a collaborative artistic activity between peers, the Olho no Dedo workshop, carried out within the scope of the Mutable Center program in Montemor-o-Novo. The intention is to reflect on the artistic production emerging from transitory materialities, in particular water, observing the work process, the behavior of materials and results.
The workshop is developed in two meeting moments, a day of artistic practice around the Almansor River and an experimentation in atelier with liquid techniques. Valuing the importance of mediation between man and the world from a subjective model of vision, considerations are established on the reflection of water and the act of observation. Based on the collective experience of the participants, the roles between the subject and the object in the act of observation are questioned, proposing non-fixed positions in the relations between the images of water and artistic production.
By observing experiences with the marbled paper technique, parallels are established between the visual image obtained through drawings with water and the unstable formation of the image. Records of the behavior of matter in interaction with the artist’s body - a meeting place for exchanges and transversality, since the manipulation of materials by touch and skin translates into an ephemeral performativity of water.