Aquatic Alchemy: Navigating Grief, Healing, and Ecological Connection.

This project began as a personal and intimate, embodied exploration of displacement, grief, care, and relationality with the more-than-human through a year-long, daily practice of swimming.

In March 2022, after several years of living with an increasingly debilitating difficulty to breath and consequently participate in social life, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease attacking my organs through scarring and hardening, causing loss of function and ultimately, failure. My body was slowly turning into stone.

Living in one of Europe’s biggest port cities and the most populated city in The Netherlands, I felt isolated, disconnected, and far away from the more-than-human relations in my native Finland were fostering connection with non-human relations was part of my daily existence growing up. I missed these relations and grieved for their absence in my current surroundings.

This is when I began my first explorations with swimming in the local city park. Through the course of the year, my daily encounters between the body of water, it’s visible and invisible inhabitants and my own body as a living organism growing fibrosis began transforming my felt experience and my conceptual understanding of myself as a ‘broken body’, gradually shifting towards experimenting with swimming as an artistic method for fostering health and connection, presence, and care with one’s local ecologies.

In my presentation, I present and think through some of these experimentations with swimming and its potential as a connective artistic practice of care and healing, through the means of visual documentation, journal excerpts and storytelling.