Water Body: Are we separated from water?

Water Body: Are We Really Separate from Water?

Inspired by Robert Macfarlane's book Is a River Alive?, Waterbody, an installation created by the artistic collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, is part of the 2026 BFI London Film Festival.

Let's talk about water. We drink it, we swim in it, we cross it, yet we continue to think of it as something separate from us. And yet, we are made of it too. The same substance flows through ecosystems and connects forms of life that, at first glance, seem to have nothing in common.

During my conversation with Barnaby Steel, one of the artists behind the collective, one idea particularly struck me: "Water is the connecting tissue that flows through all living things."

Water as the connective tissue of all life. A seemingly simple concept, yet one that invites us to reconsider our relationship with everything around us. And it is precisely this connection, normally invisible, that Waterbody attempts to make us see, and perhaps even feel.

Art meets technology and scientific research. Data is transformed into images, revealing relationships we would otherwise struggle to recognise, from seasonal cycles and phytoplankton to the migration of marine animals.

And it made me wonder: can science change not only what we know, but also the way we see the world?

Strangely enough, I found myself thinking about Project Hail Mary. Yes, a science fiction film and an installation about water might seem to have very little in common. And yet, they both brought me back to the same question: how much life, how many connections, simply escape our attention because we do not yet know how to observe them?

In one case, we look beyond our planet. In the other, we realise that perhaps we do not even know enough about the world we inhabit.

There was another thought that stayed with me long after I left the installation. If we are not separate from our environment, where does caring for ourselves end and caring for other living beings begin?

Thinking of Earth as a larger body, one of which we are all a part, also changes the meaning we give to the word care.

Perhaps that is what I took away from Waterbody: not a definitive answer, but the desire to look again at something I thought I already understood.

We are not simply surrounded by water. We are water bodies too.