KOOZWet Dreams, the second edition of the Mayrit Biennial, continues Mayrit’s fascination with water as well as the research of Bodies of Water presented at the 13th Shanghai Biennale. What prompted this line of enquiry and what is the potential of thinking with and through water today?

MIGUEL LEIRO Our interest with the element of water began in a very organic way. When my team and I were developing the first iteration of the festival in 2020, we looked into the word ´Mayrit´, which is the etymological origin of Madrid; in Arabic, it means ‘land rich in water in’. At the time, we wanted to find a word that helped us link contemporary design and architecture to a particularly local context. The stark contradiction between this aquatic origin and the present-day condition of the city — indeed, the country — which has serious issues with water management, became a radical starting point for us.

From the first edition of Mayrit, we went on to work with the Institute for Postnatural Studies for our second edition in 2022. They developed the framework and theme of Drowned Worlds, based on the science fiction novel by JG Ballard. This transported us to a more ominous, post-covid orientation of the 2022 socio-ecological context. It really helped us to delve deeper in terms of the biennial programming and curatorial outlook. We knew that this conversation had to continue; that’s why we were lucky enough the count on the wonderful Marina Otero Verzier to work with us on Wet Dreams as a conceptual framework and exhibition at CentroCentro.

MARINA OTERO VERZIER Wet Dreams continues the research developed for Bodies of Water the 13th Shanghai Biennale, by chief curator Andrés Jaque with curators You Mi, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and myself. The Biennale advocated for more-than-human solidarity and the fluid interconnection of bodies, in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We reflected on forms of “wet-togetherness” — found in processes such as breathing, transfusing, flushing, menstruating, ejaculating, and decomposing — wherein bodies coexist. Bodies of Water was inspired by the eponymous book by Astrida Neimanis and her contribution to posthuman feminisms and environmental humanities. Neimanis elucidates how the flow of waters sustains our bodies and connects them to other bodies — to worlds beyond our human selves.

I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with Andrés Jaque, You Mi, Lucia Pietroiusti, and Filipa Ramos on several projects in addition to the Shanghai Biennale. Wet Dreams is a celebration of our interconnections, alongside those with all the contributors to the exhibition, the conversations we have had over the last years, and what I have learned from and with them. Wet Dreams also embodies the insights we gained at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where I served as Head of the master’s programme in Social Design. The program has encouraged designers to channel their skills toward alternative world-making, often with a focus on the fluid and climatic. Many have used bodily secretions as co-design materials, engaged with the residual, the toxic and the stinky, or designed sensorial prostheses that connect bodies to multi-scalar climatic processes.

KOOZ For a method of design to be attuned to contemporary ecological and social challenges we might start with a focus on the design of connections of solidarity, embodiment, and desire. How can thinking of water beyond its understanding as a resource help us shift from a global to a planetary understanding of our world?

ML This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a fellow designer friend of mine. He had mentioned another older, prominent Spanish designer had attended the opening of an exhibition, who asked him, do you understand any of this? Is this design? I believe that contemporary design requires a very broad mindset in terms of the contexts in which ecological and moral problems arise within the field. The responsibility of a designer should be aligned with those working towards the development in research, politics and social change. If not, it will be very hard to create anything of systemic cultural relevance, leaving only room for the support and dissemination of a capitalist design mindset. I think Marina does a great job doing exactly this, helping us to aspire towards something more and leaving aside the more classical object-oriented notions of design.

MOV It's intriguing to hear people asking that question. I've often heard architects ponder whether something qualifies as architecture or not — a conversation that I find quite boring. However, I've never encountered anyone questioning the limits of design! I'm not interested in engaging in attempts to impose disciplinary boundaries on thinking and imagining. In this sense, water helps challenge oppressive boundaries and mentalities, as attempts to control it are met with leaks, drips, and the occasional overflow of the repressed.

Wet Dreams celebrates all these overflows. It allows us to resist prevalent fears, contemporary anxieties, or the inertia that obstructs change to dominate our imagination. At a time when other paradigms for addressing ecological and social challenges are needed, too many of us have lost our capacity to imagine alternative worlds under current conditions, and are left with a sense of exhaustion and finitude. Others simply prefer to stay in the status quo. The exhibition considers imagination and desire as crucial to counter the various defuturing effects (a term coined by design theorist Tony Fry) and the slow cancellation of the future (as argued by author Mark Fisher) characteristic of capitalist patriarchal modernity and its structured unsustainability. These "defuturing effects" have permeated our lives and even unrealized forms of living.

KOOZ Wet Dreams takes inspiration from the Spanish neologism Disoñar (dream design) coined by cultural activist and designer León Octavio Osorno. Could you expand on how the term is used in Latin America and what kind of worlds it has shaped?

MOV Against the de-futuring effects that we discussed before, Wet Dreams proposes disoñar (dream-design) as a methodology. This neologism, merging diseño (design) and sueño (dream), describes the action of individuals who take on the responsibility to design their dreams and execute them. It was coined by cultural activist and designer D. León Octavio Osorno and is used by groups of peasant activists and Latin American intellectuals. Since 1996 — when the first major meeting of "Future Dream-Designers" convened by the Association for Peasant Development in Colombia’s La Cocha, was held — there have been periodic meetings where better worlds are shaped.

Wet Dreams echoes what was the sixth meeting of dream-designers, Water: Territory of life, States of the soul, held in Villa de Leyva (Colombia) in 2014. Around the theme of water, attendees articulated political, ethical, and socioeconomic visions, intertwined with experiences of daily life, rites, art, play, memory, dreams. Water was dream-designed as a legal subject and vital flow for the construction of new relationships between human beings and territories.

Celebrating this legacy, Wet Dreams (in Spanish, Sueños Húmedos) invites participants to disoñar by building relations between ancestral, popular, and contemporary design practices relating to water and fluid matters.

KOOZ This edition of the biennial invites participants to dream design from a place of desire. What is the potential in replacing the compulsive individualistic desire of capitalist consumption with a collective erotic desire?

ML I think the notion of activating this idea of a ´collective erotic desire´ helps us to establish a very strong analogy with the ways that we sometimes let our intuition and impulses sometimes get ´the best of us´. It serves as a strong example of how designing and creating collectively can promote and instigate change. We hope that Mayrit can act as both a host and catalyst for collective creation, discourse and desire.

MOV Architecture and design play a critical role in channelling desire. Often, these disciplines and their outputs, as previously discussed, are caught in market-driven economies of desire, promoting the consumption of more objects and unsustainable lifestyles prevalent in the Global North. However, architects and designers can also offer a perspective on how to liberate desire from market ambitions.

Wet Dreams recognises these endeavours and their subversive architectures of desire. The exhibition mobilises desire, not as a yearning for consumerism but as a creative, collective energy that leads the shift towards alternative ways of living. This is the desire for ‘the good life’ — el buen vivir — not a compulsive craving for capitalist consumption, which appropriates imagination, land, bodies, relationships, and promotes individualism and productivism. It represents, instead, a collective erotic desire. As a vital force for life, desire prompts bodies and materials to connect, intertwine, and co-construct. Philosopher Luce Irigaray reminds us that desire is a transformative force capable of overcoming the oppressive social and cultural structures that limit our potential for living fully. For Irigaray, desire transcends mere sexual or materialistic impulses; it is a profound and complex motivation rooted in our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world. Desire, in Irigaray’s view, is the pursuit of an authentic and mutual connection with the other, a bond that enables us to be ourselves while remaining open to others.

KOOZ Wet Dreams brings together a number of practices which present decolonial, queer, and myriad alternative approaches speaking of healing, toxic, and residual waters and of bodily fluids. What new imaginaries are nurtured by the diverse voices which shape this edition of Mayrit?

ML Diversity is really important here. In particular, we’ve made a very strong effort to integrate Latin American practitioners that help bring the Madrid scene and discourse up to date with much of the global conversations that we are seeing, in terms of subjects of decolonisation, queer design etc. We have been working especially closely with one of our guest curators, Grandeza Studio, to develop a really daring show at the Museum of the Americas called Espejito Espejito (Mirror Mirror). This is the direct result of a careful interpretation of Marina´s framework and will hopefully turn out to be great!

MOV The exhibition Wet Dreams brings together the work of designers, architects, artists, and collectives, alongside ancestral architectures and popular practices; organised into seven sections, it brings water-focused imaginaries coming from rain, rivers, reservoirs, muds, fountains, sewers, valves, hoses, pipes, and the orifices that allow entry to the liquids soaking our worlds:

Rain and Other Discharges looks at designs for invoking rain, whether through rituals such as the pro-pluvia rogations or government initiatives — like Marco Ferrari and Elise Misao Hunchuck’s 1:1 model and audiovisual about China’s ‘Sky River’, a plan to develop the world’s largest cloud seeding project.

Overflows of the Repressed highlights acts of disobedience, intended to liberate water bodies and dismantle the controlling ambitions of modern infrastructure projects. Elsa Casanova and Ana Robles’ installation focuses on the environmental disaster of the Riaño reservoir, which flooded nine towns in 1987, erasing their land and history. In The Great Man-made River, Mariam Elnozahy uses archival material to examine the dreams embodied in what was the largest irrigation project in the world, a project that promised Libyans and Africans water independence, abundance, and freedom from foreign control. Elena López Riera presents an unpublished audiovisual on flooding around the Segura river, bringing together personal, popular, and scientific narratives that weave connections between bodies across generations and meteorological phenomena through a hydro-feminist perspective.

Pressure Valves and Overflowing Pipes analyses how these normally hidden elements are a fundamental part of the architectures of the liquid, aqueous, and climatic. They are crucial in constructing spaces dedicated to hygiene, erotic impulses, sexual transactions, and human and more-than-human care. It presents meteorological architectural designs by Philippe Rahm, alongside models and drawings by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, that reveal and allow us to enjoy the hidden urban world of the pipelines that serve us every day. Investigations by Pol Esteve Castello will discuss spaces designed to unleash desire and the exchange of fluids, such as dark rooms (with Marc Navarro), sex clubs and saunas — where uses of the body produce subjectivities and collectivities.The installation Your Restroom is a Battleground, a project by Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera and Joel Sanders, explores the bathroom as a political architecture where questions of gender, religion, race, capacity, hygiene, health, environmental concerns are articulated.

Orifices and Shared Fluids explores how bodily secretions are used as design materials. Serina Tarkhanian’s Co-Healing project proposes a collective way of caring for each other, through the exchange of fluids and microbial matter. Yi-Fei Chen’s Tear Gun — the result of the author’s personal struggle to freely express her emotions and ideas — catches her tears, freezes them, and then shoots them. Iván L. Munuera’s film, Grounded Bodies, Flying Plasma, investigates the history of the trade in and transfusion of blood. Symbiopunk, by Rebecca Schedler, is a bioreactor and a composting system that uses fungi culture to digest human excrement and challenge taboos around defecation.

Hedonistic Leaks and Waste brings together design practices that focus on the residual, the toxic, and the foul-smelling, such as the audiovisual Ca.Ca. (Cannibal Carnival) by María Jerez & the architectural office elii. This reveals the tangle of organisms, technologies, and landscapes that process and digest the city’s waste; meanwhile, an installation by the Institute for Postnatural Studies, which reflects the network of tunnels, sewers, and tanks that ensure the toxins from the environment don’t end up in the River Manzanares. And Spa profundo by La cuarta piel, promotes collective hedonism, merging bodies with the territory and redefining the relationship with toxicity.

Emanations and Soakings presents ritual architectures constructed around medicinal and healing waters, highlighting the connections between the health of the body and that of the planet. It features a photographic project by Ariadna Silva Fernández in southern Galicia, with research by Patricia Coelho and myself in Portugal based on archival material, as well as explorations around the local water-related folklore in Madrid. There is also a puppet show by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco and Miguel Montoya, which questions how water and its much-vaunted therapeutic properties have been exploited to promote tourism and large-scale urban development.

Sensorial Prosthesis presents a series of devices that connect bodies to multi-scale climatic processes. Claudia Paredes’ Neo Coolers are clay ceramics used to cool spaces, particularly data centres, making use of traditional Spanish water jugs known as botijos. Prosthetic Sensorium, by Jan Christian Schulz, is a technological device that makes it possible to tune into and participate in meteorological phenomena such as storms or drizzle, even on the other side of the planet, through a prosthetic extension of the body. Listening to Ice, is another work in which Susan Schuppli uses sonic instruments for the study and embodied experience of melting ice in the Himalayas’ Drang Drung glacier.

KOOZ Wet Dreams will run until August 25th and aspires to open the floodgates which impede profound change. How do you imagine the research and the imaginaries it yields unfolding into parallel and future projects?

ML Our curatorial director, Joel Blanco and I are currently looking into finding a new profile that can continue the conversation and work off of both the Drowned Worlds and Wet Dreams framework. We will progressively be moving away from the theme of water, opening way for other types of discourses. We are very happy with the results we’ve had and excited to keep the conversation going. It's not that we´ll be dropping the subject completely, but we are convinced that there’s more avenues to explore contemporary design.

MOV There is more to contemporary design than water. Yet, it's challenging to distance ourselves from water, given its fundamental role in our collective, planetary existence. When considering material practice, one must reflect on water — as mining for materials used in design predominantly relies on water extractivism and pollution. Similarly, in digital infrastructures or digital design, water remains central to the industry. The examples could go on and on.

There have been countless exhibitions centred on water in recent years. Water is also at the epicentre of conflicts surrounding data centres and digital infrastructures — a domain in which I am actively engaged through my work on the future of data storage, supported by Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize. By choosing to focus once more on the topic of water and fluid matters, I aimed to emphasise its importance as well as to disrupt the cycle of endless reinvention, novelty, and claimed originality that propels the design world and its consumerist tendencies. Part of my motivation for moving away from full-time institutional work in a museum was the desire to escape the pressure of continually creating new content for newsletters, social media posts, and stories. At the moment, I prefer to dwell on certain themes, recognising the value of engaging deeply with them and their multiple ramifications over an extended period, even to the point of challenging initial hypotheses.

As mentioned earlier, Wet Dreams continues Mayrit's fascination with water, while extending the work undertaken for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water. Similarly, desire — a central theme of Wet Dreams — is the focus of the Arquia Proxima festival, for which I serve as curator. My previous exhibition, Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains, presented at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, approached the notions of desire and water from a different angle. In that case, it addressed the entanglement between extractivism and exhaustion through the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the north of Portugal and the struggles of local communities for their lives and rights. Their collective infrastructures and rituals suggest counter-worlds that merge the ancestral with future generations, the human with the more-than-human, unleashing alternative understandings of energy. This research, which also looked at ritual architectures built around medicinal, healing, lithium-rich waters, is included in Wet Dreams.

Bios

Dr. Marina Otero Verzier is an architect, researcher, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Advisory Committee for Architecture and Design at the Reina Sofía National Museum and Art Center. Otero Verzier specialises in the relationships between architecture and digital infrastructures and resources such as lithium that sustain them. In 2022, she received the Harvard Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. Between 2020 and 2023, she was the Director of the Master in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and from 2015 to 2022, Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she led initiatives focused on labour, extraction, and mental health.

Miguel Leiro is a designer, curator, and educator based in Madrid who focuses on expanding the cultural value of design. After receiving a bachelor's in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute (New York City) he started a practice in Madrid that specialises in products, creative direction, interiors, and branding. In 2020, he founded Office of Design, a non-profit cultural management organisation. Office of Design’s flagship project, MAYRIT Bienal, is a leading experimental architecture and design platform celebrating its’ third edition in May of 2024.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.