Bonita-Ely_Punch-Empty
Bonita ElyMurray River Punch, performance view, Melbourne University Student Union Building, Melbourne, 1980.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Recipes for a Liveable Future

Magdalena Olszanowski
“What we do to water, we do to every body, including ourselves.”14 14 - Astrida Neimanis, “Bodies of Water,” ­interview with Richard Bright, Interalia Magazine, September 2018, accessible online.
— Astrida Neimanis

As our lives are continually upended by a pernicious network of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), artists are exploring how to repurpose them while drawing attention to their contamination of our waterways. Performances by feminist settler artists Nina Vroemen (Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal, Canada), Emily Rose Michaud (Gatineau, Canada), and Bonita Ely (Sydney, Australia) make this urgency visible in direct conjunction with and as a result of the places they inhabit. Each collaborates with a different kind of waterway: Vroemen with the network of urban supply lines that carry and contaminate water in Montréal; Michaud, with freshwater rivers and lakes in Québec and Ontario; and Ely, with the branching systems of the Murray (Millewa/Dhungala/Tongala) River and its watershed in Australia.

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This article also appears in the issue 109 - Water
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