Who (not what) is water for us? Who are we for water? In what ways can we listen more intently with water? What are they telling us about our pollution?

“Said the river : imagine everything you can imagine, then keep going.”
- Mary Oliver

GROTTO is a predominantly arts project, interested re-learning how to hear with water. Grotto offers artists opportunities to come into better relations with water bodies via workshops, speculative and actual remediation, walks, reading groups, and talks in reciprocal exchanges of arts and sciences. GROTTO is aligned with an embodied and practical understanding of the world in combination with emotional comprehensions of water consciousness, cultivating ongoing place-based artworks and community led water sovereignty projects that acknowledge and work with water’s existence as personhood, rather than as territory for industrial extraction and a lifeless site to dump waste.

GROTTO’s most prominent character, “O”, is itself a hollow container ripe for amplification of resonance, and a membrane. The “O” points to what is excluded as much as to what is included. The “O” is the shape of a wolf’s mouth as they call to the moon, the moon, who pushes and pulls the tides in rhythmic cyclicality, giving rise to all life.

Water is primary and we are fractals of the cosmos that are made of them. Water is not a resource, they are source and so too are we. We are (all) not only plasma but electromagnetically charged consciousness and intelligence in constant engagement. Thoughts are electrical impulses, the emotions that the thought produces are magnetic waves, whether joy, love, anger, there is a link between the electricity and the magnetism, the frequency output, the electromagnetic wave that beams out from us to the world. We have an aqueous, electrical impression on the world, simply in being seen. Water can be an observer and an active participant in our becoming.

“The subatomic particles we see in nature, the quarks, the electrons, are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string. …Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings…Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings…The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings. We are nothing but membranes through which cosmic music is played out on vibrating strings.” - Michio Kaku

“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” – Hermann Hesse”