FUI-42
by Daniel Martínez
By the end of the 19th century, Alphonse Forel — a Swiss scientist living by the lake Léman — designed a colour scale to assess biochemical properties of the water. Known as the Forel-Ule Index, today it is used to analyze worldwide seas, lakes, and oceans, monitoring their condition in times of environmental change.
Following Forel’s alphabet, nowadays researchers aim to empathize, listen, observe, and comprehend the language of the world’s waters that increasingly express tonal shifts, ecological alterations, and distressed flows — manifesting a shivering response to socio-political, technological, and biological tensions that echo across the liquidity of all aqueous bodies.
The Forel-Ule Index initially consisted of 11 tones and, years later, it was extended up to 21. Is today’s morphing hydrology going to unveil not 11 or 21, but 42 possible hues? Could the lake Léman turn pink? Could the Pacific Ocean become green?
As a trans-temporal dialogue between Forel’s initial studies and contemporary scientific research, the project frames a fictional documentary that speculates with uncertain watery futures that inevitably resonate throughout human transitory realms too. Hovering in a liminal space, as put in the words of Astrida Neimanis: “In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner.”
