Watery Commons
Announcing our programming theme for 2025: Watery Commons.
Connecting Threads are delighted to announce that our programming theme for 2025 is Watery Commons.
We loved this phrase when we encountered it in Hydrofeminism, a 2012 book by cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, and we’re excited to navigate how it resonates throughout the River Tweed catchment area.
Over the course of 2025, we’ll be diving into ideas of a watery commons that bubble up on multiple scales across time and place. And we’ll be asking: how can we chart connections between the local and the global, the bodily and the systemic, the material and the metaphorical?
Our focus is the River Tweed, its habitats, ecologies, communities and culture. We will work with artists and communities to engage the specific ecosystems of the Tweed through planetary flows of water, and attending to all that the water carries with it (including seeds, stories, fish, larvae, microscopic bacteria, memories, sweat, dreams, blood, economic policies, agricultural pesticides, industrial effluents, borders, sewage…).
We recognise that the term ‘commons’ has been used in many different ways. Traditionally, ‘the commons’ refers to areas of land characterised by shared uses that challenged feudal and capitalist models of property ownership. They were lands shared for the common good, not subjected to extraction or exploitation. Recently, the term ‘commons’ has been used more expansively (for example, ‘creative commons’ refers to digital models of sharing and reuse). We’re asking: what are the dimensions of a rivery commons?
Throughout 2025, we are interested in multiple conceptions of commoning in the context of the River Tweed, always from the position that there can be no meaningful thinking of the commons which is not at the same time political.
We believe in a watery commons, not only as a relic from the past or an imagined future, but also as a network of relationships that we already inhabit right now, in the present.
The full quotation that has inspired us is below:
“We live in a watery commons, where the human infant drinks the mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the fish, the fish are consumed by the whale. The bequeathing of our water to another is necessary for the custodianship of this commons. But when and how does gift become theft, and sustainability usurpation?”
Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism (2012)
