In the dawn of life, there was water.

Moving fluidity gave shape and texture to continental contours. It bathed the entire globe, hid in its insides, living underground. The humid air made it possible for the Earth and its beings to exist.

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Well, mirror, mist, ice.

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Clouds, steam, fog.

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In a kaleidoscope movement of shades and shapes, water is subverted, and it subverts its medium. Headwater and mouths and fresh springs, streams. Serpentine currents, meandering courses, or voluminous greatness, always attracting other bodies, made primarily of themselves, to swim, to sail, to settle around it.

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Its meanders create disconnected KNOTS, fluid,  changing which go from droplet to the creation of seas and oceans. They wake perception, create a sense of unity, and create  confluence.

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When the water meets the land, there are possibilities for existence and  coexistence, for fertility and fluidity for dialogues with the Anthropocene.

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Clear, the waters can serve Narcissus. They can sing in waterfalls or hide in the  depths of the woods.

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Waters serve as  pathways, but also make one sink and dissolve. Their largest tank has led and still leads warriors and conquerors, tourists and migrants with no port to dock. Between  abundance and scarcity, they flood and kill from  thirst. They inebriate. They can swallow lands and people, in a continuous sinking of territories.

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Trans.pi.re. Secrete through pores, sweat. Let it surge, appear, exude. From the human body to bodies of water, particles rise surreptitiously through capillaries, emerge into salt and sweat. It is in the perspiration of the Amazon rainforest that the rains that have fertilized it return, in an opposite  movement  to the heavens, opening  pathways to make it  rain in other lands. Lands that without these floating bodies would be deserts. Water is a gift.

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From droplet to rainbow. Teardrop, sweat, blood, excrement. Placenta. The water and the body. The water is the body. Life. Corpographies and corporealities become aqueous. Molten.

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Waters inhabit imaginations. Murky waters, iron waters, clear waters. The poetry of waters: although surrounded by the Mediterranean, it is said that the Greeks did not have a word for blue.

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Architectures and cities are made of water. In urban planning, it has become a place to flow. An old Portuguese dictionary says that streets mimic tracks on the face upon which  tears flow. In the Baroque period, the water turned into mirror. In the Modern era, it transformed, transparent, into glass.

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With the  cosmos and the memories dreamed, water is blessing and  celebration. Water, the  common good that is revealed in pacts with spirituality. Mother water. Sister water. For the Yanomami, it belongs to the  sacred. They say that the owners of the waters are the spirits of the stingrays, of the eels, of the anacondas, of the alligators and of the river dolphins, all of them that live in the house of Tëpërësiki, his father-in-law, with the rainbow being, Hokotori.

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Inhabited waters allow coexistence. Home of the fish, the crustaceans, corals. Magnets for other bodies, living, made primarily of themselves, to swim, to sail; they know, on the other hand, to warmly welcome the dead, the spirits, the orishas and the gods.

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But for those seeking profit, it is a mere resource. Dirty, plugged, they rot away smothered with trash. Waters are wild, sometimes a moving force, sometimes unyielding, throttled in levies, disappearing in the dryness of dust and in the power of fire, they are drilled vertically kilometers deep in search of the fossils that inhabit it.

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In the words of a poet, the water running through the stones is freedom finding a way, disregarding the human  neglect . One enigma for the future is the question of we will survive with it. Even more intriguing is the question of whether we will once again inhabit it lovingly.

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We are pleased to invite you all for the second  International Congress of Landscape Studies. Emphasizing the scope of the meetings, the word  Knots, which is also the motto for the event, displays primarily the connection between people and the world. By dealing with heritage, or in other words, the common good that connects us as humankind, connections are emphasized. Now, these connections are made liquid, because we will deal with  waters, a pressing theme in face of the climate challenges and in the discussion of our survival, but also due to the force that they bring to inhabitation, even in a poetic sense.

 

Although in its first edition Knots took place over computer screens, we can now meet in the city of Maceió, celebrating an universal theme with a strong local tone. Maceió and its state, Alagoas, have in their names waters to be plugged, in the ancestral vein, and in the lake strength, through the trajectories of Latin. Signalling fertile lands or quiet beaches, but also pointing to environmental crimes, it is a privileged location to discuss this theme.

 

As we proposed that erudition and common knowledge are both present as forces for the event in its first edition, new configurations will be appreciated now as example, associating science and art. But there is also the possibility to join knowledge and celebration. Therefore, a congress that transforms into festival.

 

To this end, it will leave study halls and move through the city. Its guide: waters. Sharing through the waters is reflecting on the shared life forms, on knots, on the power of the moon: the entire calendar for the event was created considering the interlude between the earthly liquids and the heavens.

 

If the pandemic demanded distancing, the consciousness that we increasingly inhabit a common home brings us closers. Knots II will be a congress for us all, itinerant and festive.

 

It is said that the feast, in ancient times, began when the time for the daily chores ended. Work was directed to build the opportunity for the feast, the moment in which life was presented in all its exuberance. Art itself was also saved for special moments, in which gods were celebrated. If today they are far, it is for them that we have an universal collection of aesthetic objects that move us.

 

So, it is through the strength of these knots of knowing, meeting, creating science and celebrating aesthetic experiences, that this congress will turn into party. A celebration that does not stop even to end in a dance under the light of the full moon.​​