Hiba Ali | Watering the Somatic Oasis

“Watering the Somatic Oasis” is an evolving artistic research project that explores water as a medium for embodied knowledge, collective memory, and ecological relation. During the Onassis AiR/ONX residency, Hiba Ali develops a new site-responsive iteration of the project grounded in therivers, coastlines, thermal histories, and bathing cultures of Athens.

Working with hydrophones and environmental sensing technologies, the artist records the city’s aquatic environments and investigate how water moves through urban, social, and more-than-human infrastructures. These encounters inform an immersive installation that asks how bodies come into relation through shared atmospheres of moisture, listening, and movement.

The project combines underwater sound recordings, motion-responsive systems, humidifiers, and interactive VR environments to create a sensory ecology shaped by visitor participation. Drawing on digital somatics, the work approaches water not as a resource to be extracted, but as a communicative medium, a carrier of memory, intimacy, and collective experience.

By connecting Athens’ aquatic landscapes to broader questions of technology, ecology, and embodied sensing, “Watering the Somatic Oasis” explores alternative forms of relation and technological imagination rooted in care, reciprocity, and environmental attunement.