The Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies is young and evolving. While it builds on a rich research history across various chairs, its identity still continues to take shape through its doctoral community, lecture series, and biannual research colloquia. In this context, it is particularly noteworthy that the co-founding editors and LUS doctoral fellows Sara Frikech and Johanna Just significantly contributed to this research activity by successfully launching two DELUS issues. Beautifully edited and curated in collaboration with the publisher Hatje Cantz and the graphic designers Studio Folder, this journal reaches for some of the most pressing challenges in our emerging field. Specifically, the second DELUS issue is chasing (rather than reaching) a notoriously evasive topic, for which I will offer a few brief reflections.
„Chasing Water“ evokes the intense action of pursuing something that the editors describe as a paradox of chasing something that is always in motion and, at the same time, hard to contain (e.g., p.6). While some of us at LUS are still busy shifting perspective from the architectural gaze to a land-centric view, DELUS takes this exploration a step further. It moves beyond traditional land-based frameworks to underscore the significance of water bodies in shaping our societies, advocating for a water-centric approach.
What could we learn from chasing water? Reflecting on the journal’s aim to engage broader audiences, I found myself once again drawn to what some might consider an unconventional inspiration. A year before the Apollo Seventeen mission’s iconic Blue Marble image inspired global climate awareness, as Sara and Johanna thoughtfully reference in their introduction, Bruce Lee meditated on the metaphorical analogy between water and motion in an interview on The Pierre Berton Show. He said:
This is what it is, okay?
I said empty your mind.
Be formless
Shapeless
Like water
Have you put water into a cup?
It becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow, or it can crash,
Be water, my friend.
Speculating on our kinship with water, Lee’s meditation traces back to Taoist philosophy, echoed in the words of Ursula Le Guin, also refefrence in the editorial of this issue. Both Lee and Le Guin align with hydro-feminist Astrida Neimanis, who assembles our bodies into a radical collectivity – connected to the watery planet through a fluid continuum.
This access to water through our bodies resonates with Yumna Al-Arashi, contributor of the cover image. Using her body, her navel to be precise, she contemplates other water bodies. Glaciers as a source of life, but also their melting, their passing, as signifiers of the mass extinction in which we’re currently living. The resulting rivers from their melting waters converge past and future into a fluid narrative finding its way through the contributions.
Within this inspiring framework, the DELUS journal presents us with nine writing bodies of water, guiding us through yet more bodies of water. Captivating worlds that feel incredibly alive and widely dispersed across all kinds of geographies. Sometimes, these stories unfold through artistic expressions like collages of liquid shadows, embroidered water maps on shawls, and beautifully rendered, gaseous water borders. At other times, they emerge through critical writing practices addressing water management, like the draining of ungoverned marshes, intimate irrigation on an island, hidden waters in the desert, an alliance of fountain waters and women’s bodies resisting patriarchal colonialism, unknowability as a tool against landscape solutionism, and the screams of a dam.
I’ll leave it at this broad overview and return to the mission articulated on the first page of the journal: to bring academic knowledge to a broader audience and foster exchange among designers, artists, scientists, scholars, and students. I think there is a telling connection to the fact that, as we learn on the following page, when water vapor dissipates rapidly enough into the upper atmosphere, it can escape into outer space. In this sense, I hope that the vapor of this DELUS issue will similarly transpire, into your and my thoughts and wherever there is space for it. If it does, the journal may still appear solid at rest, yet its content will already be invisibly transforming through us.
Author: Robin Hueppe
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