Sympoietic Society - Water Tales (2025)

Water Tales: Weaving a Nomadic Community of Practices for Place-Bound Intimacies is a collective artistic research project developed by Sympoietic Society, unfolding during a residency at Saari Manor in Finland. Rooted in a long-term engagement with ecological grief, multispecies ethics of care, and situated knowledge, the project foregrounds water as both material and metaphor: a connective tissue between bodies, landscapes, memories, and practices. Engaging the surrounding waterscapes from the Mynäjoki River to the shores of Mietoistenlahti Bay, Water Tales approaches water as an agential presence capable of generating place-bound intimacies and relational modes of knowing.

The residency functions as a laboratory for collective attunement, structured around shared embodied methodologies, including Mo(u)rning Sessions, fieldwork research, dance and theatre experiments, and sauna rituals. Through these intertwined formats, the collective cultivates embodied, speculative, and memory-based practices that privilege slowness, reciprocity, and mutual learning over product-driven outcomes. The project emphasizes the weaving of personal methodologies into a shared repository of practices, enabling knowledge to emerge in the interstices between disciplines, bodies, and environments.

Water Tales also marks a deliberate recalibration after an intense period of transnational work, proposing sustainability not only as a thematic concern but as a lived, methodological commitment. By engaging in communal rituals, site-sensitive workshops, and collective storytelling, the project frames mourning as a generative, relational act, one that fosters resilience, care, and the ongoing re-imagining of how to practice and live together on a changing planet.

Text and images from Kevin Bellò / Sympoietic Society