Immersion

The Water Room engages artists, activists, educators, researchers, writers, journalists, and performers in and around Durham, NC to create an underwater world where we can thrive, breathe, and envision community in the context of rising seas and climate change. 

Through community art builds, workshops, swimming and diving, audio and video documentary, and a study group focused on Black Surrealism, The Water Room explores the questions: How do we adapt to changing global conditions, including water scarcity, sea level rise, and collapsing aquatic ecosystems through community resiliency and raw creativity? What can we learn and unlearn about our relationships to water from practices of surrealist visioning and deep relationship-building? What tools can we discover that will support new approaches to adaptation and agency?

This project, created by a collective called the Durham SeaRealists, will culminate in an interactive public art installation that engages community members in their own connection to (and disconnection from) water through art, writing, film, sound, and conversation, provoking radical imagination about the future of our local and global waterways.

“Our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths”

–suzanne cesaire