Support for this project provided by: The IUPUI Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute, as well as the SFAI.

2017 Water Rights REsidency

Sensory Storytelling: A Sound Portrait of Water

Fiona P. McDonald's project is a sensory ethnography of how our senses are used to tell stories about shared lived experiences. The objective of this project is to create a collaborative arts-based sound ethnography with community members that captures individual stories participate in making up the larger story of the lived reality of water in our everyday lives that will feature in a site-specific installation in April 2017.

The Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) residency theme for 2016/2017 is Water Rights. Northern New Mexico is comprised of many cultures that are distinct in their traditional and evolving relationship to water and water use. Additionally, New Mexico is at the forefront of water conservation,  framed in the context of corporate, environmental, and cultural controversies. Because water is seen, now more than ever, as a contested resource, SFAI is committed to bringing together local, national, and global thinkers and creators to collectively expand and revise our knowledge of what we think we know about water rights. SFAI and its community partners will explore several questions: How do we describe and define the contested space around water? If water use is often parallel to culture, how can cultural activities result in greater models of equity in our water systems? How can diverse practices, from poetic to practical to political, create greater access to these and other parallel resources?