At the First Bienal del Agua, Demetrio Paparoni Makes Water Political

The inaugural Bienal del Agua recently opened in multiple venues in Cascais, a picturesque harbor town on the outskirts of Lisbon. The biennial’s main exhibition is on view at the Estoril Congress Center, with additional shows at NOVA University, the Paula Rego Museum, Casino Estoril, the Cascais Cultural Center, the Cascais Seafront Promenade and the town’s urban art circuit. Together, the presentations create an exhibition route in continuous dialogue with contemporary art, architecture, heritage, the ocean landscape and public space.

Running through September 6, “The Traces of Water” is notable for having been neither produced nor organized by a local institution nor born of a government initiative, as many biennials are when they seek to activate tourism or stimulate culture-led local development. Instead, it was launched and supported by OliverWater, a circular water brand, in collaboration with public institutions and private stakeholders. Its goal is to create a space for reflection on the use of water and encourage more responsible management of natural resources.

This is not the brand’s only initiative in this vein. OliverWater organizes its social mission under the term “Cruzada Humanitaria,” or “Humanitarian Crusade,” around four conceptual pillars: love, equity, nature and art. One of its most concrete initiatives is a “One for One” donation program developed with Glacier Waters International, through which every liter of water sold prompts the donation of an equivalent quantity to help people gain access to drinking water.

Water has been a recurring theme at biennials in recent years, often treated as a body that carries its own memories and encompasses both the transitional nature of human history and the long-term cyclicality of natural time. This has led to interpretations that connect to ancestral and Indigenous wisdom, as well as to colonial histories and the ecological crisis.

For this Bienal, Demetrio Paparoni, the curator of the main exhibition, wanted to foreground water‘s political dimension and the social responsibilities it implies, bringing together works that directly document, reflect on or suggest the different crises of our time, many of which unfold around water. “Here, the issue is necessity,” Paparoni tells Observer. “I cannot come here and speak to you only about water in mythic or religious systems. There are people who genuinely have nothing to drink.”

The result is an expansive international exhibition shaped by Paparoni’s longstanding belief that art must confront the political and social conditions of the present. The extensive international roster includes several names well known on the biennial circuit and across the global art world, among them Marina Abramović, Ian Davenport, Peter Halley, Roni Horn, Mimmo Jodice, William Kentridge, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Abdoulaye Konaté, Robert Longo, Thomas Ruff, Yan Pei-Ming and Zhang Huan. Given Paparoni’s background, many of the participants are also among today’s most established Italian artists, including Monica Bonvicini, Mimmo Jodice, Masbedo, Andrea Mastrovito, Melissa McGill, Marzia Migliora, Nicola Samorì, Gian Maria Tosatti and photographer Massimo Vitali.

For the curator, political engagement does not mean reviving the didactic visual language of Socialist or Maoist Realism. Rather, art should embody meanings that prompt reflection on contemporary life, and that narrative and political dimension shaped his selection of works. Visitors first encounter Tadashi Kawamata’s site-specific installation of small wooden houses attached to painted trees. Made from what resembles discarded fruit crates, the structures appear to offer refuge from nature’s entropic force, even as they remain fragile and ephemeral.

Nearby, Monica Bonvicini addresses hurricanes, destroyed homes and ecological crises. Her fragile human shelter is painted black, dripping and dissolving into water and the white space of the canvas. For years, Bonvicini has been working on the series “Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes,” which explores the destruction caused by natural disasters as visible consequences of climate change. “The images depict collapsed houses that were once people’s homes, places of safety, memory, and belonging,” she explains. “For me, these scenes also symbolize our collective failure to take meaningful action and rethink the way we use and value the Earth’s resources, of which water is among the most essential.”

Beside it, a photograph by Jordi Bernadó depicts an inaccessible lake that had to be photographed from an airplane; it is a body of water that remains beyond human reach and, perhaps for that reason, protected from both human need and human greed.

There is also an early 1970s work by Carole Feuerman, Innertube, which features disembodied hands clinging to a truck-tire inner tube suspended on the wall. The work was inspired by Cuban refugees attempting to reach Florida, but it speaks to the universal experience of displacement, the artist notes. “Water has always represented transformation in my work. Here it becomes both a barrier and a pathway. It can take life away, yet it also offers the possibility of a new beginning,” she writes. For her, the sculpture honors every person who has been forced to leave home in search of safety, dignity and freedom. “It reminds us that resilience is often born from uncertainty, and that even the most fragile vessel can carry the greatest human dreams.”

One of the show’s most striking contributions is an immersive installation by Alexander Brodsky, Archipelagus aequalitatis universalis, which invites visitors to experience the annihilating effects of an ongoing ecological disaster. In a dark room, viewers look through a window onto a diorama-like view of a sea of oil strewn with ruined buildings and small boats. Mirrors multiply the devastated architecture, while discarded motor oil creates the appearance of petroleum. Any sense of a horizon, a future or an escape from this contaminated terrestrial dimension appears already foreclosed. In the same room, Brodsky has placed a globe. “Looking down, you understand that the fragment he shows is projected onto the entire world,” Paparoni explains. There is also an old door leaning against the wall in a Duchampian gesture, stripped of function and offering no exit. “You feel unsettled because you do not know what it opens onto,” Paparoni reflects. “Yet when you look through the window, you see this surreal world: a sea of petroleum on which only the remains of the human world survive.”

The installation reflects on how, for millennia, human conflicts have been fueled by competition for resources, whether natural or symbolic, and how one of the most sought-after resources has always been access to water. The project, as the artist explains, also tries to imagine a utopian solution to the timeless competition over water, which is becoming more urgent as it grows scarcer. To provide equal access, Brodsky imagines dividing the unified ocean into one-square-kilometer plots, each anchored by a solitary residential tower. With life-support systems housed underwater, this dispersed society would live from the sea, connected by boats or swimming and freed from governments, cars, aviation and conflicts over land or resources. What appears to be a dystopian view is instead an attempt to visualize a radical alternative: a utopian water civilization.

As intended, Paparoni’s show looks at water through a lens of need, emphasizing necessity, scarcity and geopolitics. He commissioned geographer Parag Khanna to contribute a text and a global map to the forthcoming exhibition catalog, identifying areas of water abundance, scarcity and urgent need. Describing himself on X as “Geographer of the future, geo-strategist,” Khanna is an India-born author, global strategist and CEO of AlphaGeo, an A.I.-powered geospatial analytics company, as well as the founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a strategic advisory firm. He brings deep expertise in geopolitics, human geography and the mapping of global resources and population patterns.

For Paparoni, it was also important to introduce philosophical and theological perspectives into the project, rather than limiting the publication to conventional and potentially sterile art criticism. He sought to extend the urgent conversation around some of the most pressing issues of our time, starting from the belief that the world currently lacks direction and is moving almost at random. This gives artists and people working in the arts a precise social responsibility; they cannot simply disengage. “An artist may be entirely abstract and present geometric forms, but even in such work, there can be an underlying message. Whatever our language may be, we have to assume social responsibility,” he states.

Still, the exhibition’s strong political dimension does not exclude irony. Joana Vasconcelos, for instance, presents a surreal claw-foot tub covered with drain holes, leaving it unable to contain water. And some works, according to Paparoni, are more philosophical and require interpretation. He points to Lu Jianhua’s porcelain forms resembling falling drops, Gian Maria Tosatti’s field of broken glass that appears like clean water and Nicola Samorì’s image of Saint Jerome nourished by paint that dissolves like water.

Art, he suggests, can communicate political realities without resorting to flags or manifestos. At the same time, he believes art criticism must be explanatory and use direct language, for today the need for that directness is stronger than ever amid growing censorship.

Still, he also thinks explanations should not require artists to simplify their language. Culture may historically have been an elite sphere, but its audience has expanded, as demonstrated by the crowds now visiting contemporary art museums. “You have to enter into the content and explain the symbols,” he says. “We have to leave behind the generation that claimed symbols were the cancer of modernity. That is not true. We now have to speak through symbols and, above all, make it possible to understand what those symbols are.”

Curators should presumably become more aware of their audiences, yet Paparoni draws a sharp distinction between offering messages and educating audiences, or even actively pursuing audience engagement and attraction. “You cannot force someone to submit to a discourse they do not want to hear,” he says. “My role is to offer a message that people must, in some way, grasp.”

When visitors enter the Bienal and encounter small wooden houses made from discarded fruit crates attached to trees, when they see an image of a storm destroying a home, when they see hands clinging to a black inner tube and understand that someone is fleeing, when they encounter a world in which the entire sea has become petroleum and all that remains are the ruins of human civilization, the messages are there, Paparoni believes. “You receive them.”

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