This summer, we encountered fluidity as a chain reaction—an ever-present force awaiting activation. It’s never solely ours; it lingers in our wake, even as it shifts and manifests elsewhere. Fluidity resists the pull of a fixed state. It evades direct engagement, slipping through gaps, moving laterally, and ultimately taking on a psychic presence. Turning fluid meaning into matter is no easy task. It releases rage and dissatisfaction with what we are already exposed to. We, as humans, know that our time here is limited.

In confronting the theme of fluids, we ask ourselves: what happens if we reimagine human expressions through the lens of nature, engaging with its biological elements at the surface while mapping the creative depths preserved beneath? What if we do so with a sense of repelling the Apollonian rationality we are told to conform to and contend with? By adopting this perspective, we might cultivate an ethnographic intelligence—one that is sensitive to the instincts and sensory complexities of fluid practice. 

As we navigate the paradoxes of our relationship with water, Andrea Ballestero [1] urges us to see it as a shared concern that unites us, rather than a private commodity. Imagine water as a living body, its currents carrying the histories of vitality and destruction, of pollution and resilience. Humidity lingers in the air, clinging to our skin, mingling with shared breath and the salt of sweat. This touch creates an intimacy—sometimes leaving us at peace, or lost amid the chaos of everyday life.

At its core, fluids possess the power to create radical consciousness, but this cannot happen without befriending the elements that slip, sink, fail, and fall into illness or movement. Our beloved Audre Lorde [2] speaks to us directly here, addressing the provocative force of not looking away from eroticism’s electric charge. The absurdity we are told to deny is, in fact, our deepest and fullest feeling. We see fluids in the same creation, and by being in touch with it, we become less willing to accept prescribed states of being.

The life of the senses challenges us to give form to the formlessness of sonic fluids. Salomé Voegelin [3] expands on this by exploring the psycho-acoustic urgencies of contemporary life, unravelling how sound behaves, performs, and agitates our sense of self. She further examines how listening and movement become spaces where subjectivity is both supported and disrupted. Through this issue, we aim to plant a seed—a hope that these informed, fluid presences might find creative resonance, drawing us into a more intimate connection with somatic modes of attention.

While embracing these modes, we acknowledge that, like everyone else, we are moving with the changing seasons. In moving with them, fluids became a grounded and mortal theme for us to untangle. Our access to time, curation, and mobility is central to all matters of research and artistic practice, as is the immense privilege we carry to do so. Being bold in our convictions and with the narratives and storytelling we want to share, is an essential part of our identity and becoming in this conjuncture.

Shortly after attending the EASA anthropology conference in Barcelona in July, we witnessed strengthened efforts to create spaces for collective voices. Here, interlocation and mutuality echoed alongside institutional resistance and the fight for liberation amid human suffering, devastation, and ongoing genocide. Upon returning home, we felt compelled and grateful to be part of a discipline and a community that seeks ways outside of closed narratives and spaces. These are spaces where we can observe and sit with our grief, honour mass losses, and make room for healing.

In August, however, everything changed. We each lost someone within weeks of one another—sudden, tragic accidents that were never meant to happen. The weight of this loss settled deeply within us, leaving behind unresolved grief and heavy memories. It was a stark reminder of life’s fragile, mortal nature, and the fact that those we lost were not prepared for their permanence in death. A sense of incapacity arose—an inability to express or move forward. Yet, through our journal and engagements with our friends and comrades, fluids slowly brought us back, coursing through us as a reminder of our shared humanity.

These moments make us acutely aware of the need to reorganise our thoughts, prompting new ways of living that gravitate towards cooperation and self-organisation. So we ask ourselves: how can our collective grief transcend static visions of hope or apocalypse? How can it transform into an assemblage of civic mindfulness, pushing us further towards an ethical imperative—to truly face each other? MacKenzie Wark suggests that myriad forms of dissociation can be understood as aesthetic practices—exploring what lies beyond spectacle, where the fluid remnants of history and our collective struggles intersect.

The pieces in this issue have been carefully curated for their continuity and their invitation to feel more, ask more, dive deeper, and materialise an urge for interruption—an investigative tool for engaging within these intensive zones of fluidity. Visual artists, anthropologists, and researchers wholeheartedly embrace fluidity as a gateway to cultural and spiritual intimacy—a fundamental aesthetic and a vital point of convergence.

We are eternally grateful for their lens and the surrender that accompanies them.