Kinetic Worlds

Abstract

The chapter demonstrates that She Breathes Water is an intervention on environmental violence that theorizes routes to a co-imagined, shareable future. Penny Siopis’s signature “de-mastering” strategies are deployed to invite an engagement with the monstrous nobuman, imagining what it might mean to go beyond merely witnessing slow violence. I expand on how this film highlights the limits of form while also calling attention to process and materiality, as is often the case in Siopis’s paintings. The film’s preference for suggestion rather than depiction is iterative on the visual, audio, and textual tracks. I trace the meanings engendered by the specific arrangements of the found, a hybridized soundtrack of water rushing over different surfaces, punctuated by Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and subtitles that approximate verse. I demonstrate that the artist’s interventions on de-mastering exist on three planes in this film: in the stitching together of scale and form, in granting editorial control to the monstrous nobuman, and in anchoring the film through women’s anger.