2024
performance, costume

Figures in plush costumes strolling along promenades are a tradition in many resorts – the most famous being the White Bear of Zakopane. This type of live mascots inspired Hydroza, becoming the central element of their Embrace Water performance. During NARRACJE, members of the collective, dressed as the Waterdrop, interact with festival-goers.

However, Waterdrop is not a typical, cheerful element of the sanatorium landscape but a figuration of the concept of hydrocommunity. By creating the sad Waterdrop, the artists draw our attention to the damage inflicted on the planet’s waters and water systems. The mascot’s costume was sewn from collectively gathered fragments of second-hand fabrics, highlighting our shared responsibility for Earth’s water resources.

The project’s performative aspect involves the opportunity to interact directly with the sad Waterdrop. Anyone can approach the mascot, give her a hug, or take a selfie with her. These gestures symbolise care for the environment and water resources. By initiating the act of “embracing water”, Hydroza uses humour and interaction to discuss responsibility for our hydrocommunity. This planetary hydrocommunity does not exist outside of us but literally flows through us.

HYDROZA is a collective of visual artists rooted in the photographic medium. It was founded in 2022 as a result of the NOOR Nikon Academy in Warsaw. Members of the collective – Jadwiga Janowska, Jagoda Malanin, Iga Mroziak, Kasia Rysiak, Milena Soporowska, and Kasia Ślesińska – work with texts by contemporary feminist researchers and theoreticians, translating them into artistic practice. The starting point for the collective’s first project was Astrida Neimanis’s manifesto Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water. Hydroza’s premiere cycle, Who Will Cry Last?, focused on the ambivalent nature of water as a source of life, memory, violence, and oppression.