“Água com Gás is a monument to the evolution…of ethical ideas, of what is right and what is wrong. If religion imposes the idea that those values are unchanging, art tells us they are positive, they evolve and they change. Globalisation has taught us they are not only time-specific but also place-specific…” Bartolomeu Marí, 2016
During a journey through Southern Europe, Various Artists encountered landscapes radically transformed by the construction of hydroelectric dams. Entire valleys had been submerged, ancient olive groves drowned beneath reservoirs designed to supply energy and water for industrial agriculture. These large-scale infrastructural projects, often subsidised by the European Union, reveal a paradox at the heart of contemporary progress: sustainability framed as necessity, achieved through the erasure of ecological, cultural, and historical systems.
Various Artists.BLFOMADDWTLE, Agua con Gaz, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2015, 24 aquariums, bonsai, aluminium bases, and lights. Photo by: Ela Bialkowska
Drowning Bonsai recreates the image of submerged olive trees through a series of illuminated glass tanks, each containing miniature, carefully cultivated ecosystems slowly overwhelmed by water. Bonsai—symbols of control, patience, and cultural refinement—become stand-ins for landscapes subjected to extreme regulation and eventual sacrifice. Suspended between care and violence, the installation confronts the viewer with the limits of cultural intervention in nature.
Various Artists.BLFHTH, 3 Bomen, Drown.ke, pae and io, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2015, video, 2 screens, compositing: Alexis Destoop & Devi Mallal. Photo by: Ela Bialkowska
The work situates these drowned landscapes within a broader geopolitical context of water scarcity. As potable water becomes increasingly rare, access to water has emerged as a central source of social, economic, and political conflict. Rather than prompting collective protection of water as a shared resource, global water stress has accelerated privatisation. Springs and aquifers once considered public commons are appropriated, bottled, and resold by multinational corporations, often at great ecological cost—depleted groundwater, polluted ecosystems, and destabilised communities.
Agua con Gaz (detail), Gallery Joey Ramone, Rotterdam, 2017. photo by: Antoine Meyer
By foregrounding water as both life-sustaining element and contested commodity, Água com Gás addresses the nexus between water, energy, food systems, and climate change. Dams, groundwater extraction, and monoculture agriculture are shown not as isolated issues, but as interconnected pressures reshaping landscapes and societies. The installation does not offer solutions; instead, it functions as a quiet monument to irreversible change—inviting reflection on responsibility, ethics, and the fragile balance between human ambition and planetary limits.