1. MECHANICS OF FLUIDS

Mechanics of Fluids is an interactive installation that includes a data base on local and global water conflicts and processes, a working space around issues of water and an in situ rain water collector. The ongoing 'No To Water Charges' campaign, one of the first non - sectarian civic issues in Northern Ireland, is the starting point for a far wider exploration. Water becomes as such a dynamic topic, which fluidises the post-conflict political scene and infiltrates the public debate with a kind of materialist thinking concerned with economic and environmental issues, micro- and geopolitical strategies, civic rights, dynamics and self-organisations.

Water carries at the same time other imaginaries and logics, which are not anymore those of the solid oppositions. In her text “The Mechanics of Fluids’, Luce Irigaray shows how these the fluids logics have been long time repressed within Western thinking and connects this cultural and political failure to deal with the working of fluids with the social and discursive exclusion of woman and the feminine.

In the same way, we associate the presence of water in the current political debate with the emergence of an active materiality, sociality and semiotics that could induce refreshing dynamics within local and trans-local contexts.

As a workshop-in-progress Mechanics of Fluids invites local actors involved in the water protest and discussions, to use the space during the exhibition and to bring personal contributions to the database/ website.

The project proposes a device for trans-local debates (local/global, interdisciplinary, inter-communities) that could be further used for other topic based discussions and initiate as such an immaterial activist platform.

BIOGRAPHY

Atelier d’architecture autogeree (aaa) (studio for self-managed architecture) is a non profit association and an interdisciplinary network founded in Paris in 2001 by architects, artists, urban planners, landscape designers, sociologists, students and residents. This collective practice conducts research into participatory urban actions aiming for the re-appropriation and reinvention of public space through everyday life activities (gardening, cooking, playing, reading, producing, debating, walking etc.)