Momenta Biennale, Wet Futures

Sensing Nature, the title for the 17th edition of MOMENTA, can be read in multiple ways. On the one hand, it assumes a human who is sensing nature, perhaps holding a blueberry picked in a forest, exposed to various modes of perception: sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. None of us sense in the same way, and our diverse and differently abled bodies perceive and feel differently. On the other hand, the title assumes nature sensing back. Our doings register like sunlight bleaching the colour of driftwood over time or imprinting itself on the retina of an exposed eye. In acknowledging this reciprocity, the biennale works toward decentring the often foregrounded European Enlightenment human creator of knowledge concerning the natural world. It makes room for stories that dwell in the blurred boundaries between culture and nature, weaving in both human and nonhuman modes of knowing. Sensing Nature recognizes that we are in relation with nature, that we are of nature.

51 artists, 15 exhibitions, an Indigenous-led outdoor garden, an augmented reality route, a performance program and many activities such as guided tours, discussions and workshops were presented in this edition of Momenta.

FUTURS RUISSELANTS/ WET FUTURES

The group exhibition Wet Futures is dedicated to the connective spaces between land and ocean. The artists propose embodied forms of being with nature. Here, they attend to human relations with microscopic algae and with enormous marine mammals; there, they behold water and ice as material witnesses to climate change. They consider the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary migrations unfurling across the surface of the oceans, while saluting the concealing obscurity granted by water. Like the multiple bodies of a coral, this exhibition highlights our relationality with others. It suggests that our futures are wet; they are oceanic.