What if Water could Remember?
Contains AI-assisted elements
WHAT IF WATER COULD REMEMBER? is a 75-second moving-image work that begins with a painting. In the studio, I paint a child drinking from a tap. The tap is where large systems of power (infrastructure, policy, who is served and who is left waiting) meet a single body. From that image of my hand-painted original MONDLIART work, the film moves into water itself: a drop at the mouth of a tap, a river alive beneath the surface, neighbours working the soil together, and a possible future shaped by the choices we make now. The narration lets the water speak as witness, recalling who protected it and who neglected it. The work is rooted in the Vaal, where the river sustains communities and also carries the marks of what has been done to it. It combines my original acrylic painting with AI-generated video sequences, using generative tools to picture futures that communities are rarely invited to imagine. The question it leaves open is who is accountable when the river remembers.
