Marca d’água

Alice Serrazina, Leonor Guerreiro Queiroz, Nicole Manning e Sara Dionísio

We are all bodies of water.1

On every surface there is a trace.
Some traces are visible, others require light, proximity or silence to emerge.
The watermark – which we collectively chose to title this exhibition – defines a discreet, almost secret impression, revealing what sustains the image without imposing itself on it. It is presence and absence at the same time. It is what remains when everything else evaporates: it is an almost invisible signature, a memory on paper, the echo of a passage.

Astrida Neimanis has been defending the idea that water is a living element that carries memory. In her research practice based on the "feel-ed work" method, she has been working on the relationships between the natural environment of water, human manipulations and actions upon it, and the shared territories between the places of water, the places of bodies and their multiple actions and contaminatio

Water, as a symbolic element, is seen as an engine of transformation: it dissolves, engraves, transports. In its perpetual movement (whether in flowing dilution or in mutation between its various physical states), it blurs the boundaries between the permanent and the ephemeral, creating landscapes that are simultaneously internal and external, more visible or profoundly invisible.
It has the power to act as living memory, matter and metaphor, reminding us that our bodies, as well as our personal narratives, are composed of flows: of time, of memory, of desire, of pain, of resistance.

The exhibition “Watermark” is the result of the encounter between Alice Serrazina, Leonor Guerreiro Queiroz and Sara Dionísio – grants holders of the 5th edition of the “Water as a Source of Community” Grant, supported by the Torres Vedras City Council and RAMA – Artistic Residencies to artists based in the Western region of Portugal – and Nicole Manning – an Irish artist developing a research residency at RAMA since the end of September this year.

In a moment of pause between processes that are under development (and isn't that almost always the condition of works in the studio context?), the exhibition brings together diverse voices and traits — each with its natural pulse, with its more or less idiosyncratic methodological aspects, with its personal plastic manifestations, with its euphoria, nostalgia, observations, hesitations, and anxieties — united by the fluidity of a common sensibility: vulnerability, memory, poetry, transformation.

In this context, "Watermark" is understood as a metaphor and as a method: that which infiltrates, which leaves traces, which molds without making noise.
The set of works, experiments, and processes gathered here investigate memory, time, and the fragility of materials, the aspects inherent in the presence of water in its symbolic and ritual dimension, in its social and community dimension, and in its power as a founding element of an imaginary or even dreamlike flow.

Here, water is more than an element: it is thought, it is rhythm, it is shared breath. Its mark is not just a sign, but an encounter: between body and matter, between memory and instant, between what remains and what flows, in an articulation between what is shown and what remains hidden.

The exhibition invites us to listen to the echo of water in silence, but also to allow ourselves to be penetrated by its cold temperature, its vital energy, and to recognize that we are, in many ways, bodies of water — permeable, interdependent, bearers of invisible stories.

Ana Anacleto December 2025

1 Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.