For 15 years, Feda Wardak has been working in his home village in the Jaghatu district of Afghanistan, where he and local craftsmen repair and renovate centuries-old water channels damaged by bombing. In the process, he observed that water networks that are visible on the surface make the underlying water management system easier to understand. As a result, the entire rural civil society has become involved in its management, with the water now being managed according to watersheds rather than administrative boundaries.
This insight inspired Wardak to create works he calls water machines. These installations are a mixture of landscaping, technology, art, and sensory experiences. They divert water from existing networks, channel it through the installation, and then return it. The aim is to create a physical relationship between water and people and to tell the story of water through the mechanisms of these machines. By connecting to the existing network, they become part of a shared system and reveal its weaknesses, while at the same time connecting to the respective watershed.
The project for Munich involves the construction of a new water machine in the form of a crane, which will be placed on the Kabelsteg bridge across the Isar. On one side of the crane, a pipe hangs over the water, from which water flows continuously into the canal. This arrangement creates an illusion and raises questions about how the pipes are supplied with water.
The question “where does the water come from?” is central to the artist’s work, as it addresses issues surrounding water management systems and their accessibility and understanding by civil society. At the same time, the project recalls the industrial use of waterways and the diversion of resources through pipeline networks. Here, the artist chooses to make these networks visible through the pipes in order to question the way landscapes are shaped according to the resources exploited there.
