"Fourth State of Water, Women" unfolds as an immersive exhibition–workshop where water becomes both material and metaphor: a living grammar for femininity, embodiment, and planetary crisis. Featuring Charlotte Qin and Tessel van der Putte, curated by Frédéric Elkaïm, the project proposes a feminine reading of the fluid world—where blood, milk, rivers, sweat, rain form one continuous hydrological body, binding intimate life to the Earth’s humidity.
"Fourth State of Water, Women" takes its name from a scientific discovery: the existence of a fourth state of water — a semi-crystalline phase found at the interface where water meets living surfaces. For Charlotte Qin and Tessel van der Putte, this state becomes language, metaphor, and memory. For decades, climate narratives have been dominated by carbon metrics, relegating water to the margins — just as dominant thinking has too often dismissed the fluidity, care, and embodied wisdom coded as feminine.
This project proposes a reversal: a return to the liquid, not as sentiment but as method — an ethics of attention and a politics of relationship.At the centre is the proposition that the state of water is manifested in the states of women — a poetic and critical framework for thinking about what remains uncontainable: desire, fertility, devotion, rage, protection, collapse, and renewal. Water, a source of life, has long been manipulated as a
THREE STATES
I. Interior waters the pregnant body, meditation, virginity, the angelic and the sacred: a field of receptivity where power is quiet, concentrated, and luminous.
II. Tidal waters desire and being desired, intimacy, making love: a fluid intelligence that exceeds language, where the body becomes river, rhythm, exchange.
III. Storm waters vomit, danger, rage, protection: the threshold where care becomes shield, where the body defends itself, where the feminine is not “soft” but ferociously alive.
