Dryness
Single-channel video installation, 4K video, stereo, 23 min, 2026

Candles as drivers in model
Archival images and text, photo credits: Archief Waterloopkundig Laboratorium, 2025

Pieces of paper distributed at regular intervals
Archival images and text, photo credits: Archief Waterloopkundig Laboratorium, 2025

In her new installation Alina Schmuch traces the continuous transformation of water as it passes through landscapes, infrastructures, and human labour. Based on case studies from Amsterdam and Vilnius – developed during the ALTERLIFE Residency, co-organised by Sonic Acts and Rupert – she assembles perspectives from water management, purification processes, groundwater flow through geological strata, and bathing facilities. This montage reveals the intricate ways in which the human body is entwined with infrastructural technologies and the subterranean layers of aquifers.

Water is portrayed as a tangible presence, raising questions about its distribution and the negotiation of ever-new storage spaces required when rivers overflow and underground aquifers run dry. Through the control tools of hydrogeologists and engineers – such as landscape models and digital twins of waterways – the work explores water as a carrier of information, absorbing influences from its surroundings, both mineral and contaminant.

Building on these observations, Schmuch examines how photography has shaped the history of hydraulic engineering and water sciences, tracing how it produces and codifies knowledge about terrain and flow. In doing so, she reflects on what constitutes a landscape image and how, in turn, a landscape is itself shaped and defined by the very imaging techniques used to represent it.

This work has been developed and commissioned during the ALTERLIFE Residency, co-organised by Sonic Acts and Rupert, Vilnius as part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. The work is also supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Exhibition:
The exhibition at W139 is an acoustic and material study of how ecosystems absorb the impacts of militarisation, colonial occupation, and environmental disruption. The artists trace signals that travel across land, through subsurface networks, and within the more-than-human world.