Join us for the opening reception of Cristina Molina: Tell it to the River Friday, January 17, from 5-8pm.
In her immersive exhibition at Other Plans, Cristina Molina’s multi-channel video projection carries us through the gallery, halting at a beautiful installation of delicate objects framing photographs of water. Working with dancers, musicians, and clay from the Mississippi River, she highlights water’s qualities in sensual ways that simultaneously bring us into our bodies and prompt us to examine our relationships to the natural world.
On the occasion of her exhibition Tell it to the River, Cristina and I delve into a conversation that flows between the lands and waters of Bulbancha, or present-day New Orleans, and the unceded and stolen territories of the Syilx Okanagan people in the interior of British Columbia, in Canada. One place is swamp and the other is high country desert, but both have been subjected to colonial engineering, as part of a misguided human will to master water’s own desires. We consider how collaboration, art, and magic might encourage different kinds of human-water relations.
-Astrida Neimanis
CRISTINA MOLINA x ASTRIDA NEIMANIS
Astrida Neimanis (AN): What does it mean to you to say we are all bodies of water?
Cristina Molina (CM): Some Indigenous thinking and research that I’ve been doing lately proposes that we see the world through kinship systems. Framing the world in this way could potentially save us as a species. If we start to imagine ourselves in kinship with our non-human counterparts, thinking of ourselves as bodies of water is just one aspect of honoring that relational system.
You say this, too, that bodies of water are alive. To imagine myself as a body of water creates a perspectival shift. If we imagine ourselves as water then maybe we would better understand how to take care of water. I’m thinking about water in the context of New Orleans by the Mississippi River. Water is something that is always on all of our minds living here, maybe more so than people who are landlocked, because of great efforts to control water for our benefit and also to our detriment. To our benefit, because if we allow water to flow freely, as it should, then it would wipe out entire developed populations and cultures. We go through great effort to protect ourselves from water (and when I say we, I mean the Army Corps of Engineers and our governments and our institutions).
AN: Your answer inspires me to think about the relationship between water and land and whether or not their separation is really so secure. I like to imagine that water is never entirely flowing freely; it is always in collaboration and in coordination with other forms and elements. Water and land figure out together where it’s going to flow and how. And even our own bodies or, less anthropocentrically, the bodies of a sunflower or a hedgehog—those materials are also in collaboration with water. Together we figure out how water will move and flow, where it‘s needed and where it should move on. What do you think?
CM: I definitely agree. If we follow the order of things in nature, without geoengineering—that would be the way to go for New Orleans. Indigenous people living here recommended that communities only live close to the River because that’s the highest ground. There’s a street in New Orleans called Marais, which means “swamp’ in French—likely where the swamp began. You weren‘t supposed to live beyond that street or in most of the city because it’s a bowl. If we were truly in collaboration with water we would be living on the highest ground and we would be more nomadic, moving during flood season. Now we’re in this predicament where we’ve created geoengineered responses, and it’s a dilemma.
AN: It seems to me, we’re saying that the water’s transformations of landforms isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it happens all the time. But through contemporary colonial geoengineering, we’re speeding these processes up in such an unsustainable way. Neither water nor any of the beings that depend on it can keep up. I want to ask you, as somebody who also works in film and other time-based media, what you’ve learned from water about time?
CM: I have a magical practice and my relationship with time is definitely nonlinear.
The past, present, and future occur simultaneously in water. Information in water is available to us. That information ranges from the poetic to the scientific to the mystical and the narrative. I’m interested in narratives about water and forming my own story about water, specifically about water bodies that I’m connected to. For example, lately I’ve been foraging wild clay from the Mississippi River shoreline. This earth has been shaped by water and is the result of thousands of years of bones and shells and guts and who knows what else. I don’t want to test it because I’m afraid of what I might find there.
I often think about this really beautiful image sent to me by my friend Katie Baczeski who works in clay. It depicts all of the main water arteries in the United States, and how they all connect to the Mississippi River. And here I am, in New Orleans, where all of the sediment and materials collect at the bottom of the Mississippi. So, it’s not only a testament to geologic time, but expansive time, coming to a head at this one point. I think it’s powerful to see water as an archive. The clay that I’m using is shaped by water and is also an archive of the water that has all flowed to this one point. That’s why I think it’s so energetically and spiritually charged.
AN: You say you’re a little bit scared to find out what might be in there. Perhaps there’s something unknowable about everything we try to extract from water.
CM: I think there are things we can know, like pesticides and petrochemical byproducts in that clay, or at least particles on a chemical level. This level of not trusting is not because of the water itself, but because of human impacts, like individuals dumping things in the River. But of course, there are things we can’t know in terms of deep time.
AN: Or maybe other kinds of secrets and magic that we don’t have the ability to decipher? You’ve spoken about a very anthropogenically burdened present on the shores of the Mississippi, but what do you learn from the River about the future?
CM: My thought is that eventually, the Mississippi River will not be able to be contained through engineering. I think a lot about more speculative thinkers, like some Indigenous communities here and the art community, and in particular, my colleague and fellow artist, Monique Verdin. She has always proposed we start thinking about living with water in New Orleans. And she means it literally—the water will come in as it once did, so we should be thinking about floating houses and the like. And that is at once terrifying and hopeful. Because if we can learn to live with water then maybe it will be better for everyone. But I think the fear comes from not trusting governments and institutions to work with the natural world’s infrastructure.
AN: I agree. It is asking us to untether a little bit from our current imaginary of the human-water relationship. We imagine things like floating or submerged cities as part of a speculative fiction. But in fact, there are beautiful cultures in places like Cambodia or Western Africa that have lived much more aqueous existences for a long time. They just know water differently than we do.
Seeing your work on view at Other Plans, I was reminded of an artwork I visited probably close to 20 years ago by Felix Gonzalez-Torres— Untitled (Water), 1995. It’s just a beaded turquoise curtain that hung across a large opening in the gallery, maybe 10 meters across. And you stand under it with the weight of these glass beads falling on you. It was a revelation to me: Oh, this is what water feels like. This kind of heavy pressing. I bring this example up because I’m intrigued by how art opens a door to understanding different qualities of water, often missed in our superficial understanding of it. I am drawn to the way you worked with wind and fabric, mud and light, shadows. None of these things are “water,” but they still somehow bring us into a more intimate relationship with water. Can you explain how that works?
CM: My first impulse as an artist is to embody the subject that I’m trying to meditate on to really understand it. It’s a kind of body knowledge that’s different from intellectual
knowledge and research or even visual knowledge.
I always try to think about how I can make images that conjure physical feeling. One way this shows up in this installation is by collaborating with other people who work with movement like professional dancers. I also render visible the complexities of water in the costumes. When I was designing textile patterns for the fabric with my friend and textile artist Leah Floyd, we were thinking about river currents and pattern formations. And the way that light makes water visible in dynamic ways. I prompted the dancers to think about the gestures that water enacts, or how water is in active relation to us. We came up with a series of gestures like carrying, holding, diverting, flooding, draining. Those gestures were interpreted through dance. The embodiment of the gesture is another way that I’m referencing water and perhaps allowing others to experience the movement of water, because if a viewer sees a dancer performing these movements, maybe they can imagine themselves in that movement.
The fabric that one of the dancers is holding overhead is intended to imagine the various phases of the water table, which annotates when water is elevated or floods. That fabric is an abstraction of water and the dancer who is holding it is also personified as water. So water appears in all of these different phases, maybe not scientific ones, like solid, liquid, or gas, but more rhizomatic in nature.
AN: I’m not a visual artist, but even as a writer, I understand this need to feel the research in my body so it’s not just an abstracted concept. My body obviously doesn’t know everything, but it’s a place to start to feel through an idea and verify it. Since our bodies are at least 60% water, it actually feels quite scientific to imagine our bodies as empirical checkers of the ideas that we’re trying to explore through our art or writing practice.
You have said before that art, too, is a form of intention setting, of enacting a prayer, a spell, a wish. Of course we need scientists and engineers to address our current water crisis. But what about artists?
CM: I think the work of artists can address the catastrophic and urgent. Of course, we need more scientists and engineers and people who are focusing on our crisis in seemingly objective ways. The failures of these fields, if I may be critical, is that the information produced by science and engineering is not digestible to the average consumer. People get lost in facts and figures. This leads to people feeling distanced from a crisis because they don’t understand it or they can’t relate.
I think the job of art is to make people feel something, imagine something, to tell them a story about why this is critical, and life-threatening for our species in a way that can be remembered and felt. I believe art elicits an emotional and physical response, and an intellectual one, of course. That’s the power of any art form, because until you get that response elicited, then I don’t think people will really snap into action.
This is the power of storytelling. Thinking about art as magic, which is basically what I’m saying when I share that I am inspired by other magical practitioners and people in Indigenous communities who use ritual to heal the natural world–they believe in this, the power of intention. For example, there’s an amazing woman who’s a member of the Panther Clan in the Miccosukee Tribe in Florida, Betty Osceola, who, every time the Lake Okeechobee is at serious risk because pollution levels are high, organizes a walk
around the lake for herself and her community, and for anyone who wants to join. And every time they walk the perimeter of the lake, the pollution levels and the water levels stabilize. Some scientists may say this is just a coincidence. Because of my spiritual practice, I believe that if you set intentions and the more people who are focused on that intention, the greater the ability to alter something. That’s the premise of magical practice—you’re using your will to shape consciousness. When I am making art, I am using my will and all of my artistic abilities to shape consciousness.
And anyone who’s in any faith does this. If somebody belongs to the Christian faith and they’re in a church and they pray all together as a group, they’re doing the same thing. In witchcraft, if someone’s making a spell, it’s also the same thing. So that’s why I say your intention matters. And I think collective intention matters and it’s even more powerful than an individual’s intention.
AN: I love this idea of art as intention setting; I don’t think I’ve ever heard it expressed that way before. This is a really powerful idea.
Cristina Molina is a visual artist who hails from the subtropics of Miami and currently lives and works in New Orleans—two environmentally precarious cities that have influenced her research on identity, loss, and disappearing landscapes. Spanning video installation, photography, and performance, Molina’s artwork is set amidst vulnerable terrains both real and imagined. Using the language of magical realism, her works centralize little-known narratives to upend dominant histories. Molina is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Fulbright Scholar Award, the Artist in Residence in Everglades Fellowship (2019), and the Joan Mitchell Center Residency (2021). Her projects have been supported by the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The National Performance Network, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Astrida Neimanis writes at the intersection of feminism and environmental change, with a focus on weather, water, and bodies, often in collaboration with artists, scientists, poets, and teachers across various communities. They are the author of Bodies of Water: Feminist Posthuman Phenomenology (2017), and their book (co-authored with Jennifer Hamilton) How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change will be published in 2025. They currently live and work on unceded Syilx territories, where they are Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and Director of the FEELed Lab.
Other Plans is a contemporary art gallery located at the intersection of Dumaine and Galvez Streets in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 2023 by Emily Wilkerson, the gallery presents solo and two-person exhibitions by an inter-generational group of artists whose practices address the most pressing issues of our time.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Cristina Molina:Tell it to the River, Other Plans, 2025. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.