Bring your wish to the water...

Apocatastasis Votum

Premiered at the Dystopia Biennale 2026

25. Sept – 04. Oct.

at Floating Berlin

Hosted and organised by Errant Sound

Supported by Deutschlandfunk and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion

There is an obscure tradition: fill a vessel with water and your wish, wait for the water to evaporate, and the wish will be set free.

Apocatastasis Votum is a nest of ceramic and hypertufa vessels placed on the dock of the Floating University’s retention pond, a body of water that is a hybrid toxic industrial runoff and postapocalyptic protected urban habitat.

The vessels are malformed, unable to hold water. The wish has nowhere to be held.

A central vessel feeds the others through a network of tubes: oxygen and charcoal. It moves without ever leaving the work and never settling inside it.

This is the nature of the post-dystopian wish: a hope that persists despite one knowing that it cannot come true.

Each vessel is a small resonant chamber. Whispers travel the hollow body walls and return slightly changed, as if they were never entirely yours. Every wish joins a chorus of the ones made before it. In this way, the chamber never fully empties.

Apocatastasis is the miracle: the heretical doctrine that everything will be restored, every wound healed, every corruption reversed. Clean water. The pond as it was before. The world as it was before. Votum is the offering placed at the shrine before the miracle. The vow paid to a god who has not yet arrived. Faith that the favour will come. Together, Apocatastasis Votum holds the wish in the condition of permanent almost.

You are invited to bring your wish to the water.

On 25 September, 18:00, the sculpture was activated by eleven voices. Each kept a small vessel through the full moon cycle, tending water and wish in the quiet. On the opening evening, we gathered in voice.

Grounded in feminist new materialism — Haraway's natureculture, Neimanis's hydrocommons, Morton's hyperobjects — and in Derrida's pharmakon, where the votive Gift and poison are one word, Apocatastasis Votum treats the poisoned pond and the wisher as continuous: water wishing about itself. It extends my ongoing practice of necromaterialism, an attention to matter as it dissolves and becomes otherwise.

fill. the small mouth. with sky-water.
one wish. laid down wet in the dark.

lay it down.

water gives.
water is the giving-over of shape,
the long slow yes to leaving,
it goes and goes and names the going home.

granted when gone.
say it again from the other side of the mouth:
the wish arrives the moment it departs.
holding and loosing share one throat.

so …. open.
open the hand. open the wanting.
let it thin to vapour, to the ground’s wide swallow,
to weather, to another land’s rain,
to a stranger’s tuesday morning tea.

this is giving.
this is giving over.

wish through surrender:
carry the whole ache in two hands
and turn the two hands
out.

water already knows.
it asks the air where it goes and trusts the silence.
it fell. it rose. it dreamed itself to cloud
and returned as someone else’s tear.

be that ungoverned.
want it all.
release it all.
let the vessel

empty

you
into the world.

(surrender)

This project begins with a gift.

When I was a child living in Russia, I once sat with an old potter who pressed a small vessel into my hands and told me: fill it with water and make a wish, and when the water is gone, the wish will be granted.

For this project, I made eleven small vessels in that spirit, one for each of us, to carry through the coming moon cycle (September 11 to 26), passing the gift onward the way it was passed to me.

Each vessel is an invitation to a soft, private ritual at home. Fill it with water and a wish, and then do with it whatever feels right: watch the water evaporate, pour it out, drink it, bathe in it, or let it sit under the moon and keep adding more so that it never empties. There is no correct way, and no end to reach.

This is where the artwork becomes as intimate as it can be — a performance with no audience, no stage, and nothing that needs to be witnessed or shown. There is no evidence to produce, nothing to document, no proof it happened. A kind of soft anarchy: the work dissolving out of the gallery and into private life, unobserved, unrepeatable, and complete in itself.

The invitation, from me and from the vessel, is hope — moving through tides of reflection and anticipation, manifestation and release, gratitude and grief, tenderness and resilience.

Our watery eclipse is on its way.

Bring your wish to the water...

Apocatastasis Votum

Perversion