Liquid Grounds

Opening Wednesday, May 7, 2025 – 7:00 PM

Curator: Vittorio Parisi

Working from a feminist perspective that intertwines the geological and the political, the collective and the individual – the deeply personal, even – this exhibition examines “liquid ground”. This is a concept dear to the philosopher Luce Irigaray, who set out its terms in her 1980 essay, Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, a text dense with both theory and poetry.

A declaration of love to the German philosopher, the text is full of exhortations, including the one that gives the exhibition its title: “So, remember the liquid ground.” Observing the patent absence in Nietzsche’s work of water, and by symbolic extension, the absence of the feminine, Irigaray attempts to reconcile the philosopher with this element by proposing that we recall our distant past as aquatic creatures and “bodies of water”, an essential condition shared by humans and all living beings on the planet.

A term belonging to the vocabulary of geology that designates every aqueous entity from an ocean to a lake, from a river to a puddle, theorist Astrida Neimanis advanced “bodies of water” as a pivotal concept in her 2019 “hydrofeminist” essay, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist

Phenomenology. In this text, Neimanis invites us to consider the human body as an inseparable element of the natural world, one that exists in continuity with all other living things by virtue of its watery composition.

This continuity between the human, the living and water is particularly present in the work of Uzbek artist and film-maker Saodat Ismailova (1981–), whose practice lies at the crossroads between documentary and fiction. For Liquid Grounds, she presents the audiovisual installation Stains of Oxus, produced by Le Fresnoy in 2016.

This work tells the story of the relationship between the Amou-Daria river – one of the vital waterways of central Asia that was formally known as the Oxus – and the communities that live along its banks. Flowing from Lake Bulunkul in Tajikistan to the Aral Sea in Karakalpakistan,

the river bears witness to the morning ritual shared by the inhabitants of the different villages that dot its course, who start each day by whispering their dreams to the water. The river thus becomes not only a living archive of histories, identities and resilience, but also a collective “body of water”: by revisiting their dreams and their destinies, the people who day in, day out go down to meet the Oxus become one with its flow.

For Liquid Grounds, Mazzi presents a selection of her sculptures entitled Becoming and Unbecoming With (2018-2020) alongside a photographic installation Self- portrait with a whale backpack (2018). These works stem from Mazzi’s personal experience, in particular a cliff-diving accident that resulted in the rupture of several of her vertebrae and a period of forced sedentariness. Compelled to create a new connection between her body and the seascape, Mazzi made the long journey to Iceland to spend time living in a fjord.

A dialogue emerges in the exhibition between the works of these two artists who, despite their

geographically (and geologically) distant perspectives, develop similar feminist approaches to the environment and to humanity.

The ultimate goal of Liquid Grounds – the works it gathers together, the discourses that it deploys, and the curatorial gambit on which it turns – is to present a double story of transformation and mixing. Or rather, of the liquefaction of the individual into the collective, of the body into space, and of the self into the other-than-self.

The Art Center would like to thank Pascale Pronnier – Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains for her contribution to the conception of the exhibition, and Artopia Gallery, Milan, for its support in the production of Elena Mazzi’s works.