The Hydrocene as disruptive, embodied, conceptual epoch

by Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Soaking in the Hydrocene

Welcome to the leaky, circulatory, aqueous Hydrocene; the Age of Water. A conceptual and embodied epoch among many, this is the wet season. Disruptive, porous and unruly, the Age of Water circulates in the pipes of late capitalism, redistributing aquatic memories of ancient water through contemporary showers of thought and contested states of watery becoming. 

Starting with the idea of the planetary as research context and the centrality of water within the climate crisis, in this chapter I propose and survey the theory of the Hydrocene as disruptive, conceptual and embodied epoch. Drawing on the work of cultural theorist Amitav Ghosh and multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway, I propose the lens of the ‘natural-cultural water crisis’ and then elaborate on the central pillars of the natural-cultural water crisis and the social-cultural foundations of colonial-capital logics of seeing water as resource, drawing on the work of feminist cultural theorists Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis in their co-edited collected anthology Thinking with Water. I debunk the anthropocentric logics that delegate ‘water as modern’, ‘water as resource’ and ‘water as (only) weather.’ With this understanding of the natural-cultural water crisis, I propose the Hydrocene as a disruption to the terrestrial dominance of the Anthropocene. Following the academic and artistic call to arms for dismantling the hegemony of the Anthropocene, in this chapter I recognise the pre-existing research on creating alternatives to the Anthropocene; for example, the feminist collective initiative to ‘Hack the Anthropocene’ or geographer and geo-philosopher Kathyrn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. I share why this is a curatorial undertaking, a process of naming that which is hidden – a curatorial task of naming and defining natural-cultural turns. Finally, I introduce the aims of the Hydrocene as conceptual epoch, which range from highlighting the centrality of water within the climate crisis and correspondingly within eco-aesthetics, as well as how artists are cultural leaders within the water crisis. The Hydrocene expands on existing critical water theory from the blue humanities and blue eco-criticism and connects these theories to practice in the lens of contemporary art. 

My work in proposing the Hydrocene as a conceptual epoch is part of an artistic and academic impetus for cultural makers to redefine the language of this current age. It is my imperative to clearly state that I propose the Hydrocene as a conceptual epoch, not a geologic epoch. The framing of a geologic epoch and the extensive work of scientists to prove the existence of the Anthropocene is based on the findings of stratigraphic evidence. With respect for the geological methods of epoch defining, the Hydrocene is foremost a conceptual framework for aligning the natural-cultural water crisis in an embodied and affective register with the turn of contemporary art and critical thinkers.

Planetary as research context 

The planetary, as opposed to the idea of ‘global’ or ‘international’, is a term from literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, who writes, ‘The planetary is the difference, distance, and duration with, within, and against which it might be possible to think differently about being human and becoming collective.’ It is the possibility of thinking of environmental relation in terms of difference and scale that is important in using the planetary as the context in which to elaborate the Hydrocene. In seeing this state of planetary as the research parameters for this book, I choose to focus not on art and the curatorial in a void, but instead to link art and the curatorial as part of a planetary concern. As a curatorial theorist, I propose this theory of the Hydrocene as a bridge building exercise between the planetary and the curatorial. I draw on my experience of the curatorial to garner attention towards radical artistic practices that consider the planetary as their research context. 

Using the planetary as a framework, I focus on one essential ‘figure’ of the planetary: water. Water is one of the most pressing and urgent aspects of continuing life on earth, and yet water systems are in trouble. According to the United Nations Water Agency, the earth is already in a water crisis that will continue to increase in scale and severity. Not only is water the primary medium through which the effects of climate change are felt, but access to water is also becoming increasingly unstable and unequal. More frequent, extreme water-based events such as flooding, hurricanes and melting glaciers are all part of the ecological ‘feedback loops’ of the rapidly advancing climate crisis. 

For decades the link between water and the encroaching climate crisis has been documented and reported upon. In 2008 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported on the crucial link between the climate crisis and water, stating there was evidence of a global water crisis, ‘Changes in water quantity and quality due to climate change are expected to affect food availability, stability, access and utilisation.’ Further, the report states, ‘Observational records and climate projections provide abundant evidence that freshwater resources are vulnerable and have the potential to be strongly impacted by climate change, with wide-ranging consequences for human societies and ecosystems.’ This unflinching scientific language describes how the water crisis threatens the capacity for all ecosystems on this planet to function and thrive. In April 2022, the IPCC released another damning report on the state of water as it accelerates towards further instability. The feedback loops of the crisis make water systems vulnerable and unstable. Warming and acidifying oceans are intensifying the effects of drought; subsequently, drought intensifies the effects of algae blooms, which deoxygenate oceans, leading to further warming of the oceans. 

Further to this, the accumulated effects of the climate crisis are uneven, with water insecurity a burden distributed along lines of gender, race and power. For example, the rising sea waters inundating the Pacific Island of Tuvalu and the expansion of the Kallak mine on Indigenous Sámi land in Northern Sweden are both examples of the climate crisis intersecting with colonialism. The findings of the IPCC resonate with science-fiction writer William Gibson’s statement The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, which curator Stephanie Rosenthal used as the title of the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2017. This uneven distribution of water and water scarcity is paramount when considering the implications of the water crisis. 

Natural-cultural water crisis

In Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he stipulates that the climate crisis is not only a crisis of ecologies but also a cultural climate crisis: ‘the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.’ This crisis of the collective imagination is what Ghosh posits to be one of the greatest challenges ever to haunt human culture in the broadest sense. He says that the cultural climate crisis is a failure of the existing narratives to navigate the wild impossibilities of the world as it now stands, in the midst of ecological destruction. He sees these failures of existing artistic methods and forms to adequately and competently negotiate the climate crisis as context and subject, as a failure not of the artists themselves, but as part of a broader ‘imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.’ This crisis of imagination is part of the limiting narratives of late capitalism and the economic myth of ‘eternal growth’. In the words of fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.’ As Ghosh and Le Guin suggest, the power to expand the collective imagination is a chance to imagine truly sustainable and liveable world-making in multiple temporalities and ecosystems. 

Throughout the book I draw on the substantial theoretical and practical offerings of feminist phenomenologist and gender theorist Astrida Neimanis. Neimanis’ work is hugely influential to this research, and to the broader community of water theorists and artists. Her work as a cultural theorist is at the cutting edge of water, intersectional feminism and environmental change and she is a key theoretical thinker in this book and for my theory of Hydrocene. In her influential book Bodies of Water Neimanis reimagines embodiment along feminist and post-human trajectories: ‘We live at the site of exponential material meaning where embodiment meets water. Given the various interconnected and anthropogenically exacerbated water crises that our planet currently faces – from drought and freshwater shortage to wild weather, floods, and chronic contamination – this meaningful mattering of our bodies is also an urgent question of worldly survival.’ Her expansive and generative theory and practice spans notions of water and gender, power and embodiment, and includes her formation of the generative term ‘hydrofeminism’, which can be broadly understood as a form of intersectional feminism enacted with and through waters. Drawing together hydrofeminism and the planetary, the Nordic-based curatorial collective Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, which published the Danish translation of Neimanis’ original hydrofeminist text, explain it in this way: ‘Hydrofeminism is about solidarity across watery selves, across bodies of water… Water flows through bodies, species and materialities, connecting them for better or worse. Today, planetary thinking is feminist thinking.’ 

Naming the Hydrocene as disruptive theory in the Blue Humanities 

As we face a planetary crisis there needs to be a planetary response. To put it another way, the scale of the water crisis is vast and thus the theory must also operate in vast terms. The planetary water crisis deserves a planetary approach. Any attempt to think with water, as separate to the planetary circulations to which all water operates, only siphons and limits understanding of the hydrological as embodied and relational. 

This invitation for culture makers to contribute alternative titles to the Anthropocene is part of what distinguished feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway describes when she writes, ‘our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.’ The Hydrocene is a way of building a small post-human refuge towards counteracting the dominant anthropocentric understandings of water, which I have laid out as foundational to the natural-cultural water crisis.

Based on my findings as a curator, I hypothesise this neologism as a curatorial act of establishing an alternative name and definition to the current epoch, most commonly known as the Anthropocene. Rather than a strict geological era or linear time-based matter, the Hydrocene is proposed a conceptual tool and as one of many alternative names for the current epoch and aims to disrupt the supremacy and land-based logic of the Anthropocene. As is commonly understood, the Anthropocene as a term is made from the combination of two Greek words for human (‘anthropo’) and new (‘cene’), it was first coined in the 1980s, and popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J Crutzen and researcher Eugene F Stoermer. The term has been a controversial title for the current epoch and aims to highlight the disastrous impact of humans on all systems of the earth. 

The Hydrocene employs the curatorial as an act of ‘disturbance’ or ‘disruption,’ bringing multiplicity and agitation to the naming of the current epoch. This disruption to the Anthropocene is a curatorial act of changing the language and by extension the dominant narratives of the climate crisis. In naming the Hydrocene I follow theorists who critique the Anthropocene as a limiting paradigm including Kathyrn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocene’s or None. I respond to the call from visual anthropologist TJ Demos in his book Against the Anthropocene where he appeals for an expansion of the names of this planetary age: ‘we need many names to account for the sheer complexity and multiple dimensions of this geo-politico-economic formation, as well as to identify effective sources of resistance and inspire emergent cultures of survival.’ Demos’ instructive book outlines the alternatives to the Anthropocene proposed by other theorists, including the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, the Pyrocene, the Plantationocene and the Plasticene. Demos argues that these terms are urgently needed, they are ‘conceptual tools to think, rethink, and theoretically challenge the Anthropocene thesis.’ The Hydrocene aims to be one of the many slippery names proposed for this current age, and to act as a conceptual tool and strategy for understanding and elevating water, art and culture in the current times. 

I also respond to the call to ‘hack’ the Anthropocene, from above mentioned Neimanis and her collaborators in the feminist, anti-racist and queer project Hacking the Anthropocene, founded in 2016. The project describes the Anthropocene as a term for the emerging geological era in which humans are ‘centralised as the dominant planetary force’. The authors outline how the Anthropocene draws on settler colonial discourse while also ‘problematically homogenises all humans as planet destroyers and implies that we are locked into these petrifying ways of being’. Naming the Hydrocene as a watery alternative to the awkward Anthropocene is one version of ‘hacking the Anthropocene’ – where hacking implies to manipulate or reformulate. At the 2016 Australian conference for Hacking the Anthropocene Swedish post-humanist and gender theorist Cecilia Åsberg delivered the keynote address and implored for a destabilising of the Anthropocene; she suggested that what is necessary is to ‘hack a thousand tiny Anthropocenes; and even so, we have to live with the fact that we might not get out of this geological or biotic or climatological situation alive’. The feminist project of Hacking the Anthropocene specifically calls on ‘artists, writers, activists, scientists and beings of all kinds to decompose, reform, infiltrate, eject, co-opt or differently (re)configure the notion of Homo destroyer such that our shared-but-different futures might be configured.’ This is a call to action to expand the possibilities of the Anthropocene towards thinking with the curatorial on the planetary scale.

The neologism of the Hydrocene is necessary at this time as water is central to our lived experiences of the climate crisis – materially and metaphorically. As Haraway, Demos, Neimanis, Yusoff and others insist, the naming of this current age is a powerful act that builds collective understanding and meaning making. This water-based conceptual epoch aims to develop a collective understanding of the centrality of water as matter and metaphor in the current climate crisis. In naming and acknowledging the Hydrocene as a slippery, conceptual tool, I offer an alternative to the terminology of the Anthropocene and contribute to the collective understandings of the naming of our current age. 

With these incitements to rethink the Anthropocene as a term, I utilise the curatorial as a bridge-building and way-finding device within art and academia to propose the Hydrocene as a conceptual epoch. The act of naming and defining the Hydrocene is a curatorial act of caretaking, returning to the origins of the curating as caretaking.

As a curator, I look to artists who actively ‘stay with the trouble’ as Haraway insists and are not simply presenting work ‘about’, for example, melting glaciers or plastics in the ocean, but instead these artists are thinking and making ‘with’ water, in embodied and critical manners. These artists are diving in deeply and working actively towards an intersectional approach to human–water relations. Part of the call to ‘stay with the trouble’ is the centrality of the idea that those seeking to act on the climate crisis are not doing so with a utopian attitude or idealisation of the problems of the climate crisis. With the sixth mass extinction underway, the impact of the climate crisis is being felt and the call to ‘stay with the trouble’ from Haraway is a way to continue to build meaningful relations with the ‘more-than-human’ world, while actively acknowledging the grief and other difficult emotions of the losses from the crisis. In this book, the artists presented ‘stay with the trouble’ as a counterargument to ignoring the crisis or wishing it away with utopian idealism. As a curator, I look to research and support artists that are doing the same. 

Here curating – both as curatorial practice and curatorial theory – allows for the lifting of individual artistic practices to be seen in constellation with one another and their differing socio-political contexts. The curatorial, which is defined in more detail in Chapter 2, is a way to understand the power and beauty of these practices in context, both locally and on a planetary level. The curatorial is a way to digest art for audience, to build bridges of connection between audience and art, highlighting difference, context and intent. In this way, naming the Hydrocene is an act of curatorial agency that utilises the ability of the curatorial to name and define, to build conceptual bridges and ultimately to position artists as vital leaders in the natural-cultural water crisis.

In defining the Hydrocene as a conceptual framework, I place the term within the blue humanities, a field which continues to enriches the conceptual work of critical ocean studies. The blue humanities highlights the emergence of ‘oceanic studies’ as defined by Hester Blum, ‘new Thalassology’ defined by Purcell and Horden, and has been defined by Steve Mentz as, ‘the blue humanities combines water with human ideas.’ Environmental humanities scholar Serpil Oppermann also defines the blue humanities as a field which ‘critically examines the planet’s troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from various socio-cultural, literary, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical perspectives.’ The Hydrocene works to contribute to this expansive field of blue humanities.

In defining the Hydrocene, I recognise that the Hydrocene theory has many possible applications. Other applications include considering the Hydrocene in governance, where a water-centred approach has the potential to affect policy makers’ understanding of the water crisis. Similarly, the Hydrocene can be understood in the frame of activism, especially regarding First Nations-led claims for water rights and the important work of water defenders who aim to transform destructive colonial water practices. Within the humanities the Hydrocene has the potential to engage affect theory and to be performed as action-research. Within fields such as architecture and design, the Hydrocene offers practitioners a new framework and lens to recognise and connect critical water practices in the field. 

While the Hydrocene has diverse applications, the book applies the theory of the Hydrocene as conceptual and embodied epoch into eco-aesthetics as curatorial theory. The curatorial theory of the Hydrocene is concerned with deciphering, mapping, connecting, sharing and critiquing the hydro-artistic methods of embodiment and radical imagination with water that the artists of the Hydrocene present. In the next chapter I share the theoretical framework for the Hydrocene in application, as curatorial theory within eco-aesthetics. 

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is an Australian and Swedish curator, writer and researcher with expertise in the politics and poetics of eco-aesthetics and specialisation in water and hydrofeminism. Based in Warrang/Sydney she is a Research Fellow at UNSW Art and Design. Bronwyn maintains an independent curatorial practice and her first monograph was released with Routledge Environmental Humanities Series in 2024 and is titled The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water.