ARCOmadrid 2026 Special Publication – by Katya García-Antón and Margarida Mendes

In the context of ARCOmadrid 2026, and building on research into aquatic bodies developed through the curatorial sections of ARCOmadrid 2023, 2024, and 2025, Katya García-Antón and Margarida Mendes edit the publication The Word for the World is Water. World Building and Creative Resistance through Liquid Alliances. It brings together artists, writers, and scholars who think with water as a material, political, and relational force shaping planetary futures.

Water teaches that nothing exists in isolation: rivers, bogs, glaciers, wetlands, and seas carry histories of survival and violence, memory and resistance, care and extraction. To follow water is to move across scales — from the intimate to the planetary — and across worlds that precede and outlast us. At a time when waters are dammed, polluted, weaponized, sanctified, and reclaimed, this book proposes water as a guide for relational ethics and creative resistance. Drawing on Indigenous knowledges, feminist ecologies, decolonial thought, and artistic experimentation, it traces diverse water cosmologies and forms of territorial insurgency.

Authors Ailton Krenak, Susan Schuppli, Sara Ahmed, and Karolin Tampere write from the Amazonian basin, the icy rivers in Canada, the wetlands in Goa, and the Nordic–Baltic peatlands. The book includes artistic interventions by Himali Singh Soin and Karan Shrestha, and a poem by Nat Raha,  that extend its inquiry through ritual scores, drawings, and poetry, engaging in glacial journeys, wetlands, and experimentations with language that moves along with tidal force and ecological turbulence

Together, these voices form a polyphonic hydrology — a chorus of aquatic thinking that insists water is not a metaphor, but kin, archive, witness, and a teacher. This volume affirms a shared conviction: that survival depends on learning how to be water — adaptive, relational, attentive, and enduring. Step into the waters.