The Misty Way installation enacts three main elements involved in fog collection: moisture (small, condensed water droplets), wind and a harvesting substrate. In this piece, fog filmed with a high magnification camera turns each water droplet into a visible circle oscillating to its own rhythm, metamorphosizing it into a light drop collected by a textile net made from parallel threads. One hundred and twenty kilometer of thread walked, stretched and placed one by one in the interstices of threaded rods, create an inclined surface covering the entire ceiling of the room. The light drops move along and through the screen nets of flexible parallel fibers scatter on the floor covered in dark carpet. A fog of light, shadows and sound – a reconstruction of stitched noises recorded by Dutch/Swiss composer Daniel Schorno during lab experiments – splashes the visitor. A dis/orienting experience performs an intimate encounter with water – a stranger within us that passes through every cell in our bodies and invites us to enact an ethical response-ability to bring forward justice in what it means to live responsibly ‘together/apart’ with all sentience (human, non-human and inhuman) on this planet and in the cosmos, with water.

Bio:
Ana Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary Polish-born artist, living and working in Montreal and Paris. Known for her stimulating, interactive and inflatable works that question our relationship with the environment, she is concerned with issues of sustainability and the need for (intra)disciplinary collaborations to face growing environmental challenges. Currently, driven by a desire to contribute to imaginative solutions that can improve living conditions and create a more acute awareness of the global water situation, she is working on a project of collecting water from fog with scientists at École Polytechnique in Paris, as part of her PhD research. Rewakowicz has works in the permanent collections of MACRO (Rome, Italy), MAC (Montreal), MNBAQ (Quebec City), Musée de Joliette (Quebec), and has exhibited in Canada, Europe, South America and the USA. She is the recipient of many awards and grants and her works have been featured in journals, films and books most recently in Bubbletecture published by Phaidon (2019).

Camille Duprat is an assistant professor at the École Polytechnique. She defended her PhD in 2009 and joined the hydrodynamics lab (Ladhyx) in September 2013. Her research focuses on functional textiles. She has been studying wetting and drying of fibrous media since 2009, in particular in situations where the fibers composing the textile are flexible, and has investigated the role played by elasticity on the wetting and drying dynamics of these “reactive” textiles. These studies have led to several publications in peer reviewed journals, as well as several communications in international meetings and invited talks. Another focus of her research is the fabrication of innovative smart fibers that reacts to an external stimuli, in order to tune passively the response of the material. For this project, entitled “Deformation of hygroscopic fibrous materials”, she has obtained funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) within a competitive program designed to finance the installation of Young researchers in France in order to develop an ambitious and innovative project. Within this context, she has initiated a study on fog collection in 2014. Since 2018, she is the holder of the professoral chair Jean Marjoulet to develop her research on the mechanics of smart textiles at Polytechnique.