Aquatic Messaging
Presented by Senghor Reid
Aquatic Messaging is an interactive performance combining dance, music, and visual art to educate people about water justice. Through movement, sound, and graphic messaging, the audience gains knowledge about the privatization, deprivation, and contamination of our water sources while learning to heal their own relationship with water.
Clean, safe water is biologically necessary and wholly not substitutable, yet globally, corporations commoditize water, creating shortages in exchange for corporate profits. Where not tainted by industry and pollution, water is still at risk of contamination through aged delivery systems, antiquated processing practices, low quality standards, and limited access for those most vulnerable. Detroit faces a public health crisis plagued by water shut offs and alarming levels of lead and copper within the water supplied to the city’s schools.
Aquatic Messaging promotes dialogue around the issues of water justice in our immediate and global community, foregrounding the health and wellness component of clean water consumption. The performance is set in a not-too-distant speculative future where water is hazardous and scarce, but no less necessary to life on earth. Aquatic Messaging engages audiences’ senses through call-and-response guided by percussion, physical participation, and large-scale interactive visuals to make the importance of water to our collective ability to thrive personal and visceral.
Date: November 16, 2019
Partner: The RAW Space
Location: 8420 W McNichols Rd, Detroit, MI 48221
Coordinates: 42.41724, -83.15412
About the Artist
Senghor Reid explores the interactions between the human body and the environment, creating visual representations of dreams, memories, and traces of human contact with nature. Reid earned a BFA from the University of Michigan, a MAT in art education from Wayne State University, and attended the internationally recognized Marathon Program at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Schools (Bloomfield Hills, MI) and is a National Board Certified Teacher in visual arts (National Board of Professional Teaching Standards). He has received many awards including the Governor’s Art Award (ArtServe Michigan). Reid’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad in galleries and museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Kentler International Drawing Space, St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His work is in private, public, and corporate art collections.