Voicing waters: (co-)creative reflections on sound, water, conversations and hydrocitizenship

This chapter offers a creative, exploratory, non-representational ecology of narratives about water and sound. Water is, clearly, vital to life. It is present in the world in an abundance of seepings, percolations, flows, evaporations, precipitations etc. This fluid profusion is enabled by water’s liminality and loose materiality, and consequential response to pulls of gravity, surface tension, wind, and so on. Water is present on the earth in many natural ‘bodies’ - oceans, seas, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds etc., but also via many techno-cultural forms, such as drinking, waste and irrigation, fountains, swimming pools, and combinations thereof. Water dissolves other compounds, carries material as it flows; it mixes, joins, assembles and disassembles. Sites such as bodies, cities, houses, stand within and between inter-woven networks of such flows. These sites are soundscapes as well as landscapes. To human ears and minds, flowing, or moving, bodies of waters ‘sound’, i.e. they make noises, and can be said to have ‘voices’. Here the authors draw upon a selection of projects dealing with conversations with water and hydrocitizenship