Thirst
The Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition explores the relationship between freshwater, climate change and territory, and delves into the design of ancient water management systems (image: M’hammed Kilito).
“The concept of thirst actually came through my research into the etymology of the word,” says Janice Li, curator of the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition, Thirst: In Search for Freshwater. “In many languages, ‘thirst’ shares the same root as words that are associated with territory. So you can imagine in early civilisation, the concept of having to draw borders relates to the motivation of thirst.”
While many exhibitions have explored the importance of oceans, seas, and rivers, Li points out that freshwater remains understudied, despite its importance in sustaining the lives of the majority of the Earth’s beings. “Only 3 per cent of the entire content of this blue planet’s water is fresh,” she says. “With the climate breakdown that we’re facing, that number has only gone down.” The exhibition underscores the relationship between climate change and water scarcity through projects such as M’hammed Kilito's photographs documenting the ongoing degradation of Moroccan oases, while also highlighting the role corrupt and unjust water management plays in water shortages, illustrated by projects such as Adam Rouhana's 2022 photograph of Palestinians swimming joyfully in a waterway filled with seasonal rainfall in the West Bank, a resource that is controlled and severely restricted by Israel.
Palestinians swimming in a waterway filled with seasonal rainfall in the West Bank (image: Adam Rouhana).
The visceral sensation of thirst is explored through Raqs Media Collective's installation of sculptures and videos of Rajasthan’s ancient stepwells, which use a network of pyramid-shaped steps that lead down towards wide ponds of collected rainwater. “Through this work, you can see more poetic exploration of cyclical time, of access, of the longing for water,” Li says, describing how the collective draw comparisons between the circuitous experience of descending the stepwell and the present-day challenge of water scarcity. “Imagine a really hot summer day, 45°C, walking in circular motion down the stepwell, and you don't know whether there's any water until you arrive at the bottom,” she says, illustrating how the maze-like structure can reflect the desperate, hallucinatory state of dehydration. The architecture of stepwells creates a space for socialising and performing rituals on the shaded steps, and the structures are more reliable, longer-lasting and easier to maintain than typical wells. First constructed over 1,500 years ago, many of India’s stepwells are still in use, while others are in the process of being revived.
Raqs Media Collective’s installation features sculptures and videos of Rajasthan’s ancient stepwells (image: Raqs Media Collective).
An even older technology originating in ancient Iran, qanats are underground water transport networks that channel water from aquifers at the foothills of mountains to different locations using gravity alone. “The Guardian had at least three or four articles last year about the drought in Sicily, which is actually a very water-rich island,” Li says, explaining that qanats were installed on the island during Muslim rule from the 9th to 11th centuries CE. “In the 19th century [however], the Italian government wanted to privatise water, which is why they built an industrial aqueduct that caused pollution, rather than using a more natural way of transporting water.” Unlike stepwells and qanats, which are built to be communally managed and maintained, aqueducts are typically centralised structures that divert supplies of water towards cities, rather than smaller communities. A film created by LOTs, a collective of artists, designers and researchers, traced the small number of farms in the village of Scillato which still manage water collectively using qanats, enabling them to grow citrus fruits in spite of widespread drought.
The failures of public infrastructure are demonstrated by a ghostly image of the water pump in London’s Soho that caused the 1854 cholera outbreak when it was contaminated by waste dumped into the River Thames by the British government. The sewage system that was constructed four years later to prevent further outbreaks has scarcely been updated since its inception, leading present day water companies to yet again dump sewage into waterways. An example of natural sewage treatment, meanwhile, is shown through the Eden in Iraq project, which aims to repair the damage done to Iraq’s marshlands after Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the 1990s in an effort to root out Shia rebels, a move which later led to sewage collecting in them. By designing a wetland that transforms sewage into mineral substances that clean water and provide nutrients for plants, the Eden in Iraq team have created a public garden for the indigenous Ahwari people to enjoy. “They're building using technology and materials that are indigenous to the land, using a design that references ancient Mesopotamian wedding blankets,” Li says, gesturing to the garden’s diamond-shaped plots of plants and flowers.
Dala Nasser’s installation of fabric dyed using samples of tap water from 60 districts in Beirut displays the impact of water infrastructure collapsing (image: Diriyah Biennale Foundation and Dala Nasser).
Visualising the dire impact of water infrastructure breaking down, an installation by Lebanese artist Dala Nasser features dark red, brown and pale red fabric gushing from the corner of a room like a foamy, polluted stream. “The public water infrastructure in Beirut is completely defunct after decades of civil unrest,” Li says, explaining that the piece is made up of 60 pieces of fabric, each dyed using tap water from a different district in the city, with the varying levels of salinity in the water influencing the range of colours on display. “Women suffer the most from saline water,” Li explains. “It causes miscarriages, infertility and a range of gynaecological issues.” While people in Beirut who are able to afford it buy water tanks instead of relying on tap water, in other parts of the world people drill private wells into the ground to secure consistent access to water. At the close of the exhibition, architect and researcher Anthony Acciavatti’s models of three cities that depend heavily on groundwater – Jakarta, New Deli and Tuscon, Arizona – demonstrate the impact of widespread tube wells. In Acciavatti’s work, floating layers of mesh demonstrate the geological strata that is pierced by the tube well, with densely packed layers illustrating where the surface of the ground has sunk due to excessive groundwater use.
Architect Anthony Acciavatti’s models of cities that rely heavily on groundwater show how tubewells impact geographical strata and cause cities to sink (image: Anthony Acciavatti).
Acciavatti places the subsurface at the top of the model and the surface at the bottom, using his architectural visualisation skills to shift perspective to what is happening under our feet. “Between 1970 to 2003, 30 per cent of all of the planet’s groundwater has been extracted, and this rapid extraction caused an 80cm shift on the planet's axis,” Li says, “so you can just imagine how much climate pattern change has been caused by that.” Tube wells were first developed in the 1860s, and Li points out that the British used the dissemination of the technology to justify their colonisation of Abyssinia, as well as deploying it in other parts of the empire. “A key message we want to bring to the audience is that traditional ecological knowledge is rooted in a really deep, specific understanding of the land itself,” Li says, “rather than systems which are devised to be deployed internationally, which take a more colonial, expansionist approach.” At the close of the exhibition, an installation by Raqs Media Collective considers the future of this colonialist approach, with augmented reality graphics that explore the possibility of mining water from outer space.
A mass baptism taking place in the River Thames (image: Chloe Dewes Matthews).
The mysticism of water flows throughout the exhibition, from bottles of water filled at sacred healing sites to paintings of ancient Iranian paradise gardens with fruit trees and fountains fed by qanats in the middle of the desert. Water provides nourishment for souls as well as bodies, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in Chloe Dewes Matthews’ photographs of a neo-pagan ritual, a Hindu offering, a Muslim evening prayer, and a mass baptism, all taking place along the River Thames. Equitable access to water is imperative for physical and spiritual sustenance, and although ancient technologies are also corruptible – qanats can be privately owned, and lower caste communities have historically been denied equal access to water from stepwells – the exhibition successfully demonstrates how traditional designs that favour collective ownership are key to sustaining healthier communities and landscapes. “Unless we remember, we cannot repair,” author Elif Shafak writes in the book which accompanies the exhibition. “And what we cannot repair will keep resurfacing and coming back, again and again.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown