Water Prints

WATER PRINTS (2022) is an archive of experiments testing the interaction of prints with water, and varied painting and paper folding techniques. These liquid methodologies, developed around the creation of monoprints, were initially planned as samples for the ‘liquid memories’ workshop and resulting publication ‘liquid memories ~to read with water ‘(published May 2022). Whilst that collective photobook work responded to the group’s challenge of photographing / remembering with water,  this publication Water Prints differs in the way it privileges paula’s more personal process. 

The term “water prints” is mobilised to designate  a way of altering the photographic surface via concrete intersections of the materialities of photoprints and tainted water. The selection of water prints guides us into the realms of water and its archival time, exploring the liquid entanglements of water, place, photography and memory.

Submitting historical photographs and documents collected around the zone of Pasteleira Reservoir (around the Douro river, Portugal) to multiple watery treatments, shows us, on the one hand, the way water is mobilised towards historical constructs that define territorial power; On the other hand, water’s material mobility  equals the nonlinear flow of time, suggesting why our memories may appear to us in the shape of watery places and phenomena.