This soundwork gathers its name from the work of scholar, poet, and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who weaves and articulates Black feminist thought through the lens of the kinship that exists through water bodies. All Water Touches Water Everywhere is an ongoing body of sonic explorations that works with African water cosmologies to attend to ways of being and knowing.

Turning to the womb as an embodied form that, through water, sustains life, the soundwork – consisting of a single-channel sonic sea/wombscape – is an invitation towards deep listening and sacred breath, an offering of attunement towards the self in relation with and to others. Comprising field recordings created in collaboration with the Swahili Seas, the Ziwa Kuu, the Indian Ocean, and found audio archival material, the work foregrounds Swahili water cosmologies and how women’s musical technologies and rituals, such as vugo, unyago, and taarab, echo, reflect, and pulse in tandem with the water bodies they exist by and in. Breath here is a call and response, a heartbeat as a drumbeat, that ebbs and flows in liquid, liminal time.