This project creates spaces for shared reflection and embodied exploration in places where water holds complex cultural and environmental meaning across the Balkans. It brings together diverse groups (artists, students, neighbors) to explore how water shapes belonging, memory, and ecological perception. By learning a tactile, non-extractive printmaking process together, participants co-create something experimental, ephemeral, and deeply rooted in place. This project approaches water as a living archive of socio-ecological entanglement.
Between November 7 and December 19, 2025, the project will move through six sites: Corfu, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Hungary. In each location, it will be based for one week and culminate in a half-day workshop (around 4 hours) co-organized with local partners, including the Arillas,Corfu-based Water Artistic Research Group, the Goethe-Institut in Albania, SKUP Collective and Grafika in Novi Sad, and ACT in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Each workshop invites participants to join a local water walk to observe and reflect on the presence and absence of water. We will collect discarded drinking cans from the environment and learn how to transform them into lithographic printing plates to submerge them in nearby water to capture the oil-based residues floating on water’s surface. These residues reflect water’s contact with the world: the subtle traces of life, movement and pollution it carries. Participants will pull prints from these surfaces through a collective process that renders the water’s latent archive visible for study and reflection. The prints will contribute to temporary installation in a public urban or natural space, evoking questions about environmental memory and place. The installations draw on a method developed in an earlier project about the East Sea’s water bodies, now transformed to ask whether natural water bodies can be carried into the heart of places that are shaped by silence and collapse.