Flowing Streams was a multi-residency project taking place in different rural spaces across Romania throughout the summer of 2024. It involved seven residents selected through an open call, each hosted by a local organization in proximity to different bodies of water: unique mineral water springs, the largest natural lake and salt lake in the country, the second largest river in Europe, as well as small but crucial mountain rivers, streams, and water springs. The project facilitated an exercise to create a bridge between artistic propositions and the rural world, between European practitioners and local organizations, and between existing hydrological conditions and future possibilities of restoring human-water relations.

"These catastrophic climate effects have not emerged out of thin air. In the last decades the rising temperatures have caused the cascading effects of flooding, droughts, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination and ocean acidification.

We are in very deep water, yet not in a literal sense. While there are a plethora of social and governmental endeavours struggling to protect, expand, adapt or maintain hydrological ecosystems, one approach is the reevaluation of people’s relationship with water-as-commons in order to repair hegemonic perceptions that water is a given or an endless resource for extraction and commodification.

To give a reminder of what Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis wrote in the book Thinking with Water, “all is not well with the waters of the world – nor with the social relations mediated by their flows.” Water is what people make of it." - Adelina Luft

Adelina Luft is a curator whose practice emerged and developed in Yogyakarta (Indonesia) along decolonial lines of thought and modes of working that favor processes, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity. Her projects address human-nonhuman interdependencies, the relationship with land, practices of resilience and resistance, as well as ways to self-determine a situated curatorial position in relation to institutional structures of power. Since 2021 she has been based in Bucharest where she curated and initiated various projects. In 2023 she was the co-curator of Biennale Jogja 17 „TITEN: Embodied Knowledges, Shifting Grounds”. Adelina is part of tranzit.ro/Bucuresti and works with and from The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life.

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Edition of 500 copies.

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