WILL WATER REMEMBER?
Artistic Research
Duration: January – May 2025
Collaborators: Sound Design and Composition by Jesús Vergara
Mentor: Dr. Laura von Niederhäusern
Methods: Embodied fieldwork, poetic writing, and sound recordings



Will Water Remember? is an audio essay that invites attunement to water as a more-than-human presence.



 “Daily Exposures: A Symposium on Research in the Arts”
ZHdK, Zurich University of the Arts. May 16, 2025.Emerging from six months of embodied, poetic research across two locations, Monterrey (Mexico) and Zürich (Switzerland), this project weaves field recordings and reflective narration into a sonic inquiry of care, access, and ecological memory. The final sound composition was created in collaboration with sound artist Jesús Vergara.

The work grew out of an embodied, reflective research process shaped by methods such as stillness observation, walking, weathering, journaling, and sound recording. It moves between two cities marked by contrasting relationships to water, one shaped by drought, the other by abundance. The piece traces how habits, infrastructures, and access influence our understanding of water in everyday life.

Will Water Remember? invites listeners into a space of attunement and reflection. What does it mean to live with water, rather than just use it? Can we unlearn extractive habits and listen differently to the ecological relations we are part of?

The piece closes with a speculative memory along the Santa Catarina River, imagining a future shaped not by intervention but by gathering, where resistance takes the form of presence. A space where we sit still, listen, offer, and let water take its place. In this imagined time, ritual and gathering become modes of protest, ways of attuning and remembering with water.
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