WATER AS METHOD: SPACE, PLACE & THE HYDROLOGICAL GAZE IN MOVING IMAGES

19-20 June
Glasgow School of Art
Art, Film & Research Symposium

Water as Method: Space, Place & the Hydrological Gaze in Moving Images is a two-day symposium (19–20 June, 2025) exploring the poetics and politics of water in contemporary artist moving image (AMI) practices and methods. The symposium reflects on innovative approaches in film and moving image practice that respond to the intersecting planetary crises of climate catastrophe and geopolitical conflict—through the lens of water.

This event is curated and organised by Kelly Rappleye (AHRC-SGSAH PhD, Glasgow School of Art, Art Curator 16Collective) as part of doctoral research, and hosted by the GSA's School of Fine Art research. The programme is organised in collaboration with FieldARTS research programme (hosted by the Infrastructure Humanities Group, University of Glasgow), and generously funded by SGSAH Engagement Funding.

The symposium invites contributions from artists, filmmakers, researchers, curators and creative practitioners. We welcome participants from across disciplines, including but not limited to visual arts, film studies, cultural geography, urban studies, art history, fine art, memory studies, and environmental humanities, to join us in Glasgow to share watery poetics and approaches in moving image practice.

Find out more about the programme here.

Collaborators:
Dr. Struan Gray (Senior Lecturer, Falmouth University) panel convener
FieldARTS research residency, Infrastructure Humanities Group (University of Glasgow), programme

The symposium programme was shaped through a peer review process convened in May 2025. We warmly thank the following contributors for their time, insight, and care in reviewing submissions:

Peer Reviewers: Dr. Struan Gray (Senior Lecturer, Falmouth University); Maria Howard (Phd, GSA School of Fine Art, multi-discipinary artist, Lecturer at University of Glasgow); Pelumi Odubanjo, James McCune Smith doctoral scholar University of Glasgow, Curator Glasgow International festical; Sandra Park (St. Andrews, School of International Relations); Rachael Ryder (AHRC/SGSAH-awarded doctoral PhD, GSA School of Fine Art); Andrew Maccrimmon (Glasgow School of Art, School of Fine Art).

Research Context:
Bringing together artists and scholars working with hydrocritical practices in the moving image, this symposium extends ongoing research into how hydropoetics (Ryan, 2021) offers new methodological and epistemological frameworks for researching place. The presence of water in both urban landscapes and film operates as a material and poetic carrier of memory and history, capable of holding multiple and overlapping narratives and subjectivities. Urban waterways, river basins, coastal zones, port areas, and hydrological infrastructures reveal situated material, historical, cultural, and political conditions of the urban, demanding new creative and critical strategies of situated fieldwork.

Emerging dialogues in arts and humanities research—foregrounding geologic (Litvintseva, 2022), topological (Mansfield, 2016; Costantin, 2021), infrastructural (Davies, 2024), tidalectic (Brathwaite, 1994; DeLoughrey, 2020; Hessler, 2020), and oceanic (Syperek & Wade, 2020) approaches—have increasingly shaped contemporary artistic practices. These practices often draw on postcolonial philosophy, decolonial feminist imaginaries, and ecocritical, hydrofeminist methods emerging from the blue humanities (Hofmeyr & Lavery, 2022). This is reflected in a burgeoning field of AMI that deploys hydropoetics to interrogate urban coastlines, canals, and riverways. Such works frequently engage the archive to narrate submerged maritime histories of migration, extraction, and diaspora—revealing speculative watery archives and unseen infrastructures of climate colonialism embedded in urban waterscapes.

Water in urban environments produces spatial and temporal states of permeability, spectrality, stagnation, and decay, enabling reflections on the presence of multiple pasts and layered histories. Moving image representations of watery poetics in urban landscapes often enact forms of multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009) and transnational place-memory, illuminating how traumatic legacies of colonialism, conflict, and displacement continue to structure the present.

Considering water as an affective infrastructure (Bosworth, 2023) in moving image practice opens further questions around how hydropoetics represent, mediate, or narrativise affective relationships to water infrastructures—and how these shape processes of remembrance, memorialisation, and place-memory (Knox, 2017; Bosworth, 2023). As a method, hydropoetics may also disrupt the visual regimes and epistemologies of colonial modernity, subverting the logics of legibility and photographic representation that structure dominant Western traditions of history-telling (Quijano, 2000; Wynter, 2003; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014).

Contact Information
For any queries about the event or your submission email Kelly Rappleye
Contact Email: waterasmethod@gmail.com