MARE: Walking with Water

MARE Mohavedi
Figure 1. Remote Walk with the Photographer: The Moment of Water Arrival at the Khaju Bridge, Isfahan. 2023
Date
2026 April
Subtitle
Remote Participatory walk along the River (Zayandeh Roud)
Author / Publisher
Mahroo Movahedi for MARE: Methods in Artistic Research
References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Ingold, T. (2010). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge.

Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE Publications.

Series

MARE: Methods in Artistic Research is a series by the members of the Focus Field Transdisciplinarity

Central Questions

Drought and climate change formed the core of my research, which asked: how does water, in its presence and absence, shape perception and reconstitute social life along the river? My research was initiated by the question: in what ways does water, in its presence and absence, configure human perception and reconstitute social life along the river? I was particularly concerned with how embodied practices, such as walking mediate, negotiate, and recalibrate the relationships between people, landscape, and temporality. I explored how walking, as an embodied practice, mediates relations between people, landscape, and temporality, and how it might apprehend transformations in place that elude conventional ethnographic tools.

 

Method and Practice

In my research, I used multiple methods to apprehend the river’s shifting presence across seasons, yet walking crystallised as the central mode of inquiry. The Zayandeh Roud’s ephemerality often made sustained presence impossible; when the waters returned, I was absent, and my interlocutor mediated the moment. This absence gave rise to the Skype Walk/Zoom, a digitally mediated practice with a photographer and participants in Isfahan. At 6 p.m. European time, 9 p.m. in Isfahan, we connected as he walked the riverbank, narrating its mutable scene while I followed virtually. Through his footsteps, my remembered trajectories, and the unfolding current, a hybrid research space emerged, conjoining presence and absence, and enabling both ethnographic observation and embodied reflection.

 

Research Instruments

The Remote Walk through Zoom  transformed traditional instruments from mere recorders into co-agents of research, where the ruptures of dropped audio, blurred images, and overpowering voices became knowledge in themselves, revealing the volatile entanglements of water, presence, and mediated walking as both method and metaphor.

 

Reflection

Walking remotely with my informant underscored the impossibility of grasping place as fixed or stable. As Doreen Massey (2005) argues, place is always in flux, multiple, porous, and ambiguous rather than bounded or singular. Walking remotely with my informant made this fluidity palpable, not through touch or direct sensory presence, yet it opened a different mode of attunement one shaped by spontaneity with what the river and its environment chose to reveal in the moment. Such experiences align with Barad’s (2007), Haraway’s (2016), and Ingold’s (2010) notion of worlding, where place is continuously formed through material entanglements and emergent relations. The sudden return of water, its sound at times overwhelming the narration, exemplified what Bennett (2010) calls thing-power, the vibrancy and unpredictability of matter, whose agency unsettles human-centered perspectives and reshapes embodied experience.As Heike Eipeldauer notes, walking extends beyond its poetic dimension by fostering new forms of thought and re-establishing relations between people and place (2019). In my research, the return of water reconfigured intimacy with the riverbanks, reorienting people in bodily and spatial terms. Through both physical and virtual walking, the method unfolded as a dialogue between environment, body, and technology, opening up new epistemological pathways for artistic research.