THIRST is an art & science collaboration between drag queens, kings, burlesque dancers, microbiologists, ecologists, medics, photographers, and designers. Together, they embody a microorganism for every month of 2027.
Water is the original source of all life – the substance through which everything is entangled. The water that carries bodies, memory, oil, microplastic, myth… and microbes. Across cultures, and for thousands of years, water has been revered as sacred, as kin, as divine.
94% of all life on Earth is aquatic. Yet nearly half the world’s human population already experiences severe water scarcity. Microplastics now pollute the water cycle, through our bodies and atmosphere, into the breath. We are living through a climate emergency caused by our own profound disconnect from the wonders, and intricate interdependencies, of the living world.
The facts are known. What is lacking is not information but imagination: a way of feeling the stakes that might move us from grief into wonder, from paralysis into play.
THIRST offers that swerve.
A shift of scale – downward, inward, inside-out, toward the microscopic. Towards organisms that live in and through water, that have survived conditions beyond fathoming. They are weird, wonderful, strange, sexy and political. What might these microbial muses teach us about understanding our existence on a planetary scale?
The methodology is queer, transdisciplinary and positioned from the micro and the other/wise – a place where art, science, activism, social justice and embodied joy are not separate channels, but parts of a patchy, moving body. Who makes the work shapes what the work can do and say. Diversity among collaborators, makers and represented bodies is not a principle, but a practice.
Exploring the unknown, the little-seen and the seldom-heard can be euphoric. Learning the lives and adaptations of others can replace despair with curiosity, transforming the weight of individual guilt into the astonishment of collective entanglement. A reminder of the more-than-human. The aquatic. The microbial. The wonder.
Each microbe in THIRST has been selected for its remarkable relationship with water. From microbes involved in cloud formation to those thriving in boiling hot springs, together they tell stories of survival, adaptation, interdependence and balance. At the centre is not the human, but relationships – sticky, microbial, ancestral, entangled, and wet. A thirst for knowledge, quenched.
These encounters arrive through the most ordinary of objects – a wall calendar. Something found in homes and kitchens, laboratories and break rooms, offices and communal spaces. Not in a gallery or behind glass. On the wall, at human eye level, in the gaze and imagination of people who may be changed by that strange, minor contact.
What might you see if you stop to look?