Drawing Water

Climate Imaginaries at Sea: Drawing water

An exhibition of works by students of the architectural department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Collaboration with Anne Dessing

Dates: November 18/19/20

Opening: Friday 18 November: 17.00 – 20.00

Open: Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 November: 12.00 – 17.00

Place: Tolhuistuin, Solid Grounds Movement, Water Studio.

Water can be in plain view but we don’t necessarily see it in the profound way it deserves. When we don’t really see water clearly, we don’t think about it as deeply and creatively as we otherwise might. Reimagining water and opening ourselves to new ways of understanding water starts with the simple act of paying attention.

In a course designed by Anne Dessing, students of the architecture department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie have been investigating how to represent their ideas of water. What drawing tools do we have? What tools do we lack? How can drawing methods be improved? What mediums can be used? Based on material study and investigations into historical imaginations of water, the students’ work renegotiates our relationship with water today and hopes to make you think about it a little bit differently.

 Anne Dessing is a Dutch architect. Her practice, Studio Anne Dessing, operates at the intersection of art and architecture. She researches architecture through exhibitions, installations, drawings, models, interiors and (temporary) buildings. She uses the discipline’s powerful representational techniques as tools to understand societies as complex aesthetic systems.

‘Drawing Water’ is an exhibition of the architecture students at THT in collaboration with Anne Dessing. The exhibition is part of Climate Imaginaries at Sea, a CoECI project of the lectorate Art & Spatial Praxis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Lectorate of the Academy of Theatre and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK) and the Visual Methodologies Collective at the AmsterdamUniversity of Applied Sciences (AUAS) The Climate Imaginaries at Sea coalition explores possible futures in and around water through a range of artistic and participatory research practices, brought forward by three collaborating research groups from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Academy of Theatre and Dance, and the Rietveld Academie. With ARIAS – a platform for artistic research in Amsterdam- and a network of partners like Tolhuistuin and the Institute for Sound & Vision, the coalition develops ways of responding to Amitav Ghosh’s statement that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination”.