In the beginning, life assumed a holistic appearance. Over time, humans began to slice up and separate the world to fit their immediate needs and desires. As such, our experience of life has been segregated into various binary understandings—of up and down, light and dark, and of course, of wet and dry. In terms of wetlands, a cosmology of extraction1 and efficiency has further driven a wedge between the wet and the dry, blinding us to the fact that all lands are wetlands in essence.2

Segregation is the first step in extraction, and it is initially marked by a flow3 between spaces and forms. To have an extractable universe, the boundaries4 between wet and dry need to become thicker and more felt. As such, water needs to be constantly drained from the desirable and diverted into the undesirable. This is a violent act against space itself, which threatens the balance it imposes on life around it.

Media description:

In terms of sound, wet and dry point to different sonic features. A dry sound refers to the pure (imagined) sound of a body itself, as if it is being sounded inside your head. Wet sounds, on the other hand, carry information about the acoustic environment. An actual sound includes aspects of both dry and wet natures. A process of segregation is a loss of space itself and the life it supports. The era of segregation is eventually overrun by the flood.5