My name is Lada Hršak, I’m a designer, researcher, architect, and curator of the studio Thirst which we’re about to discuss. Also, I am a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and have my own practice in Amsterdam which is called Bureau LADA (Landscape Architecture Design Action).

My name is Saskia van Stein. I’m the director of the International Architecture Biennial Rotterdam, a knowledge institute as well as a cultural platform and its main objective is to generate real world change, using the power of imagination and design as its main instrument. We invest in design-driven research, with which we set a special agenda, and every other year we bring all this research together in an exhibition. The IABR 2024 is entitled the Nature of Hope. We’re looking at our landscape, at biodiversity, and a new brief for architects as the building blocks for, hopefully, a productive future. But we’re here to talk about the project Thirst. The reason why IABR assigned this project is rooted in the fact that the institute, which I came to run one and a half years ago, has a longstanding tradition of investigating water and different Delta regions from different perspectives – reflecting on scarcity, reflecting on abundance – which we also call floodings – and talking about water sovereignty. In 2005 WEST 8’s founder Adriaan Geuze curated a large exhibition entitled The Flood and, later, the hands-on research project entitled Water as Leverage – so water as leverage for multiple stakeholders and addressing how water is the connector throughout different spatial and socio-cultural challenges. Then, in our Water Week, from poetic to politics, we investigated contemporary projects and discourse around ownership and water, as one can’t get a mortgage on movable property like a floating home.

The main, and contemporary, question I came to understand is how to learn to live with water, not merely control it. In particular in the Dutch context we have rationalised our landscape and now, due to climate change, our relationship with water asks for a different response. Many of these large scale questions for society are addressed on a systemic, technocratic level and in the technocratic realm we can design, control, we can give imagery – but what are the cultural implications? What are the softer, or possibly different topics at hand when we want to talk about the future of our planetary system and the role water has within us and around us, on multiple scales? The reason I wanted to put this topic out there stems from that legacy. And second, a ‘water- and soil-driven design’ policy is being implemented by the Dutch government. Now, nobody knows what that policy actually entails, but it’s one of the first times that the deeper ecological currents of our country, of our land, and the forces that they entail, are being brought into the conversation. Which obviously, in a country as rationalised as the Netherlands is – we pump everything out therefore there is the Netherlands – this has huge consequences on the spatial and material near-future of our countryside. It’s something that has my thoughts and everybody’s looking into how to understand this policy and how to design with nature rather than opposing it. So, this was just the beginning of the conversation, or of the curiosity I had, and I was excited, Lada, that you came on board for the proposal of Thirst. Maybe you could take us along some of the important anchors that you latched onto while thinking about water – obviously an immense question.

Thank you for this question. Water is also part of my own work and so that is also probably why I was approached for the curation of this studio. While thinking about water, there are always questions of scarcity and abundance, which are both part of the conversation of ‘the interconnected system of wetness’. I thought of Thirst as a strong title for the studio as it carries many social implications. This title has multiple layers: an existential layer, an exploitative-environmental layer and it is largely articulated by greed (consumer capitalism). The socio-political nature of Thirst is represented by these three main pillars. In the curatorial statement, (that you also contributed to Saskia), we talk about the ecology of entanglements, and how things are related to one another. - I found it quite interesting when you mentioned water and soil policies. A very long time ago, there was a prevailing idea of the tabula rasa, implying an ‘empty’ territory. Now there’s more and more awareness of interconnected ecosystems and (invisible) cultural and political layers within certain territories. Despite ‘nothing to see’ with the human eye, there can still be quite a lot occurring. For example, think of taking a cross-section of a territory: this roots and connects us with geology and geological time, far beyond our stretch of life. We positioned questions for the studio within those large relational parameters. Six studio tutors who very skilfully guided the students did fantastic work to each characterise their own studio brief and bring the works further (thank you all very much!)

One of the main inputs for the studio Thirst comes from a recent article in NRC magazine, reporting worries by Dutch water supply companies, about insufficient drinking water capacity by the year 2030, which is really close. In a country like the Netherlands, with world-famous water infrastructure everything has been engineered to make the water run away as quickly as possible. Our territories, infrastructure, cities, and ‘land’, are engineered to take the water out. Yet now we find ourselves in the middle of a systemic shift, wondering how we can re-adjust spatial policies for upcoming climatic and social urgencies (and diverge water governance). This matter is very present in politics and amongst policymakers, and that’s why this is a precise moment to engage students from the Design Academy!  We are really pleased with your invitation Saskia.

That actually brings me to acknowledge that we are experiencing a systemic shift when it comes to how to control land in relation to water. And while you were talking I realised that we seem to have forgotten that there is a correlation between what happens in the subterranean and what happens on top. For instance, the way in which, in the 18th and early 19th century, how our cities developed was very closely entangled with our rivers and later the sewerage systems – these are things we no longer engage with. I’m also reminded of a very beautiful essay on how rivers used to have much broader spans, river Meuse is now squeezed into 200 metres which used to be two kilometres. So there are different levels through which we can approach this topic – I can’t help but think about the landscape as a sponge and how, in this rationalised Dutch culture that pumps everything out, we should, instead, allow for water to literally slow down and permeate deeper into the subterranean of our countryside. Another thing to touch upon is, as you already mentioned, water as a commodity, and how we’re running out of drinking water, but I’m also very much intrigued by water as a metaphor when we talk about Thirst – maybe an existential Thirst. I found this a very nice topic that can be unpacked in so many ways. Could you touch on some things that you found particularly remarkable in the different topics that were brought forward and how the students dealt with them? Are there topics or perhaps some new narratives that stood out particularly?

This was quite a challenging studio in the sense that it was compact in terms of time, therefore I’m really amazed by the amount of work and the quality that the students have achieved. Group projects – a cross-disciplinary collaboration across all five masters, combined different approaches across Information design and Geo, from Contextual to the Critical Inquiry Lab and Social Design. Students had different backgrounds, from art to tech, design, and theory, all coming together under the umbrella of the Design Academy. This cross-disciplinary scope of intelligence enables us to address such broad, complex questions.

An interesting work deals with climate anxiety – something very present in the current generation at the Design Academy – including a humorous, satirical video in which a therapist helps someone who is struggling with their water consumption. This was a recurring topic across multiple projects. There was a whole stretch of work where the students acted as agents or activists. One of the projects engaged with a village in Greece whose water is being privatised. Since one of the team members is Greek, they managed to collaborate directly with the people from the village. They address a very complex matter of who owns the water. In the ‘Greek’ case, water comes from a spring, (supposedly the cleanest one in the country), and now it’s being bottled so state-owned companies are trying to privatise it, taking access away from locals, and questioning their agency. There are many, similar examples across the Mediterranean, each with respective initiatives that are actively  engaging citizens with regard to their access to water. Quite some projects dealt with the issues of commoning and collectives, and how the collectives can ‘listen’ to the agency of a body of water. Another group engaged in search of underground wells perforating the skin of the earth until the level of the groundwater aquifer. Other projects deal with wetmarks, specifically in territories with strong human and more-than-human presences, such as in the Dutch sand dunes. Most studios transcend the generalised idea of water as liquid and deal with topics such as snow, wetness, dunes, hydrofeminist narratives, and water utopias. One studio focuses on Point Nemo, the most isolated place on earth,where space debris is being dumped in South Pacific’s waters while another on the ‘soft’ pollution of Berlin’s FKK lakes by Tesla’s new factory – Thirst is presented as a complex interconnected system of territory, actors, and agencies. This Summer it became increasingly clear how the climatic shift we are experiencing is playing out, especially with the heating of the Mediterranean and the resulting floods from alpine areas downwards – this all falls under the topic of wetness.

I’d like to riff off on the notions of metabolic thinking and interconnectivity. If we talk about a systemic shift through the lens of water, are we acknowledging that we are part of an entangled environment? And how can we understand our relation to several ecologies of entanglement? We ourselves, we can’t live without water, we are water. And yet I would say that the biggest shift that we’re working through at the moment is to not place ourselves above nature but to try to understand how we can operate within it, which also brings a whole new language of fluidity and porosity. How can we engage, on the one hand, with these large planetary climatic influences that, due to their scale, feel like they’re out of the grasp of single individuals? At the same time there seems to be another shift towards trying to reconnect to whatever it is to be human, to respect the more-than-human in jurisdiction. Is this something that, thinking about Thirst, we can relate back to how we, as humans, position ourselves toward the big, fluctuating forces – air, land, and water? This is another large question.

Yes, it’s a large question and a very good question. Both personally and professionally, I think that we are part of nature, of nature-culture as an entangled system. Structures of thought, historically speaking, have been separating the two and now everybody feels the need, the pressure, and the relevance to combine them. The question becomes how to reactivate the primordial sense of being water and being part of nature – several proposals are dealing with that topic, where the students are literally putting their hands and feet in the mud or embodying the pulse of water (physically and digitally). Personally, I find it beautiful when performative acts address the question of rewilding oneself and embracing ourselves as part of nature. This could be a wonderful embedded exercise for people involved with policy-making and politics. Those practices have long been present in many indigenous cultures but have been pushed away as ‘barbaric’. Currently, I see a comeback of various embodied practices, therefore this is also felt in the students’ work. Some students engaged with the topic from a personal bodily perspective. For example, one project proposes a dry bath – taking a bath without using water. This is a reflection on personal responsibility towards contemporary infrastructures that we more or less take for granted, the same structures that Thirst is theoretically taking away from us.

Another thing that came to my mind while reflecting on the projects was the idea of how fear, or even the militarisation of water for instance in the bombing of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, or the privatisation of water as you mentioned earlier, has generated a desire for solutions to counter this narratives of fear. It seems that we have been able to understand the what needs to change and are shifting towards finding a vocabulary for how to situate ourselves and find entry points within these larger, planetary realities. And indeed we see that the use of indigenous or situated knowledge and how local identity and water are entangled becomes re-examined or revalued as opposed to some grand narrative – it’s all very contextual. I’d like to zoom out a little bit and talk of the more general lessons – where would you say this project, Thirst, would situate itself in relation to these planetary, climatic questions, and where do they come up in the students’ work?

Well, I would say there are several possibilities. One is by offering a set of different approaches to water and Thirst, especially by pointing out the spaces and habits related to water that do not even resemble water. This could be inspiring for policymakers, planners, and designers. On the second level Dutch culture is structured around water, or water defence in particular. Dykes and water-related society have been built since the 10th century – creating a kind of ‘Dutch indigenous’ practice. What has really radically shifted since the 10th century is the scale and violence of our operations and their impact on the environment. In that sense, it is crucial to think about scale, scaling down the control and adjusting our desires to allow any future water narratives to unfold. There was a project about a floating terp, (a piece of land floating on the water, which was quite hilarious) that effectively addresses and challenges policies around fluid entities, which is also a way to address Thirst. Proposed projects, with their enthusiasm, courage, and, sometimes even naivety (or freshness), question current knowledge structures and address the need for a new vocabulary within the systemic shift we are experiencing. We have seen the Tuvalu politicians speaking with water up to their knees – the climatic shift is not only a future prospect, it is a lived experience for many communities. Our students, coming from different territories, in their design response connect communities, and bodies, with the scale of the Netherlands, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Their response to Thirst is a call for action through active design propositions and narratives towards the planetary scale of entanglements.