Water and Time
Re-evaluating our relationship with the vital source.
The precious nature of water, to drink, grow with, wash or swim in, has become the focus of much of our attention. As the summers grow warmer and drier due to the impacts of climate change across the globe, and heavy storms become more frequent, Beer&Berries 2023 sought to explore water’s extraordinary qualities, and our essential relationship to it.
Across the programme we explored different aspects of water, from ancient myths of water beings and their contemporary re-imaginings, to more practical discussions on managing various aspects of water through the likes of raingarden planting and innovative agriculture.
The language we use to describe bodies of water – the speed of flow or surge, the rhythm of ebb and the stillness of stagnation, echoes our descriptions of time and how we communicate its passing. Yet increasingly we experience our encounter with water not by natural rhythms but temporal extremes. In thinking about water in the contemporary moment, the programme for Beer & Berries considered the changing temporal needs for our interactions with water, from saving (not wasting) to slowing and the rhythms of re-use. Bringing together artists, writers, researchers, growers, dowsers and musicians, the programme explored water as a richly sensory material, a poetic image and a precious resource.
Imagining water
Water deities have appeared ubiquitously throughout human history and across cultural boundaries, personifying the creative (and potentially destructive) powers of water, its material properties, and its central role in human lives. For millennia, all around the world, these beautiful, serpentine beings were venerated in prehistoric cave paintings and ancient temples and celebrated in art and material culture. But with the emergence of agriculture and industry many societies shifted their religious beliefs to worship humanised and (with the emergence of the major monotheisms) supreme male gods, valorising human rather than non-human powers. Following the fortunes of water beings in different societal trajectories reveals key changes in human relationships with water and the environment.
Having been invited to Beer&Berries, Professor Veronica Strang introduced her recent book On Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (2023). Her research traces the evolution of water deities, following water beasts and gods over cultures and millenia as a means to explore how and why many societies moved away from respectful nature worship and adopted the exploitative practices that have led to the current environmental crisis.
Turing her attention to the contemporary political arena, Veronica discussed how water beings are resurfacing, enabling researchers, indigenous people, environmental activists and artists to critique destructive practices and articulate more sustainable ways of engaging with the non-human domain. By illuminating the past and inspiring new thinking, water beings can help to turn the tide.
Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS is a cultural anthropologist affiliated to Oxford University. Her research focuses on people’s relationships with water, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. Her publications include The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (2009); and Water: nature and culture (2015). She recently completed a major study of water deities around the world, exploring how they reflect critical shifts in human-environmental relationships. This is described in her new book Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (2023).
Connecting with water
Since 2018, Bint Mbareh has been thinking about how communities can engage with the resources at their disposal in a way that's respectful to their individual dignity as well as respectful to the life of the resource itself. This has required a rethinking as to whether elements like water and time can be thought of as resources at all, or if they are essential to the makeup of the human body and community, as such water and time can be conceived of as parts of us that have temporarily been displaced. Through their work with communities in Palestine, shared conversations have taught Bint that the water around us is indeed, part of us, just located somewhere else, and that through song we can bring it closer to ourselves. The same applies to time - where time is imagined to be big, small, scarce or plentiful, according to the needs of the community which is asserting its sovereignty through song or other means.
For their participation in Beer&Berries Bint guided a brief soundwalk through the grounds of Hospitalfield. Following the walk she introduced the audience to some of the research and ideas guiding her work before ending the festival day with a live sound performance that incorporated traditional chants, rain songs and electronic music.
Listen to Bint in conversation with Marta Castillo on Dhikraa, a quarterly podcast curated by AMWAJ and produced by REVOLVE, exploring water stories throughout the Mediterranean
Bint Mbarah performing at Cafe OTO London
Bint Mbareh is a Palestinian artist working with sound as a physical medium. She is concerned with its capacity to cross borders between bodies as well as in between continents, thereby rendering some borders less powerful in some imaginaries due to its ability to build connections between physical entities as well as the borders between now and then. She has researched rain summoning music as a way of re-defining the borders between seasons, questioning the linearity between the past, present and the future usually taken for granted. Communal singing and listening practices play a vital role in her understanding of communities' abilities to build infrastructures to experiment with care in the face of oppression.
Bint Mbareh has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York, at Darat al-Funun in Amman, at Khalil Sakakini in Ramallah, Cafe OTO in London among other spaces. Her work has been shown at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, as well as the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh.
Finding Water
An ancient means of locating water, dowsing is still used by contemporary water companies such as Thames Water and Severn Trent Water to detect leaks.2 Beyond the search for water dowsing it has a variety of uses in everyday life: it can be used to find lost items and buried artefacts, test for food intolerances, identify geopathic stress areas, measure and locate imbalances in the body’s energy field, and much more. Grahame Gardener hosted an introduction to dowsing workshop, grounding participants in the use of the pendulum, L-rods and other dowsing tools. Alongside handling the tools Grahame showed participants how to integrate the principles of dowsing into their daily life and work, enhancing intuition and decision-making skills.
Grahame Gardener has been dowsing professionally for over 20 years, specialising mostly in geopathic stress remediation and electromagnetic surveying of properties, a field now popularly known as ‘building biology’. He also designs and creates sacred spaces and has a particular fondness for labyrinths. He is a Professional Member and Registered Tutor with the British Society of Dowsers and served two terms as President from 2008 – 2014. He is also a member of the Canadian and American dowsing societies, a founder member of The Geomancy Group, and is co-chair (with Susan Collins from Canada) of International Dowsers, dedicated to fostering greater links between British and North American dowsing traditions. He is a regular keynote speaker and workshop leader at international conferences and has published four books – ‘Dowsing Magic’ books 1 &2, ‘A Basic Guide to Technopathic Stress’, and ‘Dowsing with Sigils’. He has also published a revised second edition of Roy & Ann Procter’s classic ‘Healing Sick Houses’.
Water Beasts
ʻAjāʼib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʼib al-mawjūdāt (The wonders of creation, or literally, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of things existing) by Zakriya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (circa 1203-83) is among the best known texts of the Islamic world. It is often referred to as "The Cosmography." The work begins with an introduction, and is followed by two sections, the first on supra-terrestrial, the second on terrestrial creatures. Al-Qazwini concludes his work with a section on monsters and angels. In the section on Monsters al-Qawini describes water deities.The genre of Aja'ib al-makhluqat (The wonders of creation), of which al-Qazwini's work is the most famous example, includes texts in Arabic and Persian that describe the marvels of the heavens and the earth. Numerous manuscripts of al-Qazwini's work have survived, as have several Persian and Turkish translations.
Artists Daniella Valz Gen and Rehana Zaman held a film and writing
workshop responding to the festival themes of water and time through Al
Qazwini's Wonders of Creation.
Rehana Zaman is an artist based in London. She works predominantly with moving image to examine how social dynamics are produced and performed. Her work speaks to the entanglement of personal experience and social life, where intimacy is framed against structures of authority. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her practice. Recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (UK touring), Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Boros International Sculpture Biennial, Sweden and Serpentine Projects, London, UK (forthcoming). Her films have been shown at Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Liverpool Biennial 2018, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018; Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival; Sheffield Doc/Fest; SAVAC, Canada; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; Whitechapel, London and Bétonsalon Paris. In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle published by PSS and curated The Range, Eastside Projects, Birmingham. She was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award in 2019 and her films are distributed by LUX Artist Moving Image.
Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text. Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT. Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals. Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot.
Playing with water
Artists Kim Baxter and Kirsty Walker devised family friendly workshops that embraced the playfulness of water and its material properties
In A Splash A Splosh A Drip families and young people were invited to join Kim to explore the sounds of water and the potential to create a musical score scooping, pouring and splashing with water alone.
For Fillling Time Kirsty invited Beer&Berries audience to explore the concept of filling time using watercolours made from natural resources found around the house and garden.
Kim Walker, a splash, a splosh a drip
Kim Walker is a Scottish artist and educator based in Tayside. She works with sound, video, installation, and performance. She gained her MFA in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the recipient of the Sound Departments Trustee’s Merit Scholarship. Kim gained her BA (Hons) Time Based Art from DJCAD and holds a PgDip in Library and Information Studies from the University of Strathclyde. Kim has exhibited her artwork widely through artist-led spaces, larger galleries, festivals, and broadcasts and has held a variety of artist in residence positions. She has extensive experience delivering creative, informal learning projects for individuals, community groups and schools across Tayside. Recent projects include Wild Escapes Eco School; ARTIST ROOMS: Young People’s Project
Kirsty Baxter is a local artist and facilitator in Arbroath who practices in watercolour, oil and video. She is inspired by stories, heritage and place.
Managing water
As climate change is disrupting the familiar weather patterns we are seeing more frequent instances of heavy rain storms. One means to manage the affect of such storms is to develop raingarden planting. A raingarden is a shallow area of ground or dip which receives run-off from roofs and other hard surfaces. By mimicking natural rainwater retention and infiltration characteristics within a constructed planting design, raingardens offer a sustainable, nature-based solution to flood mitigation as well as providing enhanced biodiversity capacity.
An experimental raingarden was created at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh1 to help cope with the impacts of more frequent and intense rainfall events linked to climate change. Dr. David A Kelly Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot-Watt University and Kirsty Wilson, Herbaceous Supervisor The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, spoke about the hydrological and planting design of the garden and the data their are gathering on the effectiveness of raingardens to mitigate flooding.
Kirsty Wilson is a Garden Manager at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. She is also a presenter on BBC TV’s Beechgrove and appears on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time as a panellist. Kirsty worked with Heriot Watt University and the Water Academy to design, implement and manage the Rain Garden at The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. In 2021 she won the RHS Roy Lancaster Award for her contribution to horticulture and has published her first book this year ‘Planting with Nature – A Guide to Sustainable Gardening’.
Dr David Kelly is Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. His research interests include the monitoring and prevention of cross-contamination from building drainage systems, the impact assessment of climate change on rainwater systems, the use of green infrastructure and sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) for stormwater management, and the promotion and analysis of water efficiency measures within buildings.
Water as a resource
Considering water as a resource in farming and food production local Arbroath coffee roastery Sacred Grounds discussed how much water is involved in making a single cup - following water use from growing to roasting and brewing, flagging where and how water can be saved along a coffee beans journey.
How water is used and can be conserved in food production Derek Stewart Director of the Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC), a flagship project at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, introduced the innovative Vertical Farming research currently being undertaken and its benefits for reducing water use, connecting to renewable energy on the east coast corridor and enabling consistent fresh produce in uncertain future climates.
Raingarden at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh