TAMA / Presa
2026
The installation examines water as an affective and political medium: a substance that remembers and carries traces of domestication and resistance. Its central figures are the wild stream and the dam: the former — alive, cold, untamed; the latter — an apparatus of control, arrest and transformation.
Water, like the female body, is subjected to architectures of use. It does not exist for itself but for extraction and exploitation.
Immersive and contemplative in nature, the work offers passage through a shallow layer of water accompanied by projections of wild nature. It is a space in which water returns to itself and is reconfigured as body.
PRESA presents itself as an emotional system, a psychophysical
landscape — an invitation to relate to matter that remembers. Situated within posthumanist thought, the work aligns with materialist feminism, ecocriticism, and practices of resistance against regimes
of exploitation. There is no single prescribed route through the exhibition: the water indicates direction and sometimes diverts the trail.
— the artist
The work PRESA proposes an international perspective from the collective on the tensions of expanding contemporary
wars and conflicts, which seem to be heading… toward the metaphorical “end of the world.” Within this framework, the
liquid element occupies both the material condition of the support and the role of political and corporeal metaphor.
Starting from an image born in a therapeutic process, the artist transforms the intimate experience of stasis into an
exhibitionary device capable of unfolding layers of meaning — emotional, historical and ecological — before the
presence of the public.
The project’s central gesture is twofold: on the one hand it affirms the force of the stream — the wild, the cold, the
unpredictable; on the other, it denounces the containment devices embodied by the dam: physical and social
infrastructures that regulate flows, extract, and negate the autonomy of the living. In this respect, water is presented as
witness and archive: it preserves traces of domestication while also holding potentials for becoming and resistance.
From a theoretical standpoint, PRESA is situated within contemporary debates in materialist feminism and ecocriticism
as well as within posthumanist frameworks that problematize the subject/object dichotomy and anthropocentric
primacy. The work proposes a political reading of the female body as a territory subjected to architectures of use, while
between spectator, space and matter.
The staging — a shallow layer of water traversed by projections — compels attentive presence and a non-linear spatial
choreography: it is the liquid dynamics that dictate the route; the audience does not traverse passively but is addressed
by the medium’s sensibility. The experience is at once contemplative and tactile, intimate and collective, raising
questions about memory, vulnerability and practices of care in relation to regimes of exploitation.
PRESA does not deliver closed answers; rather it proposes an affective and conceptual field in which to intervene,
debate and recognize one another. It is an invitation to listen to the whisper of the stream, to read surfaces and to
imagine other politics of flow.
© Agata Stępień 2025