Wet Dreams addresses water beyond its understanding as a resource, exploring its role as a catalyst in eco-social relations. The exhibition highlights design practices that embrace decolonial, cuir and hydro-feminist approaches, emphasizing forms of embodiment, solidarity and desire in relation to bodies of water and fluid matter.

Wet Dreams speaks of waters that heal, of toxic and waste waters, of bodily fluids. It invites rain, rivers, reservoirs and mud. It conjures up sewers, stopcocks, conduits hidden behind walls, in cellars and under ceilings. It invokes the world of hoses and pipes. And the orifices that allow the liquids that soak our worlds to enter, as well as the occasional leaks, drips and overflows of the repressed.

The exhibition is structured around the following practices:

- Emanations and Soakings: on ritual architectures built around medicinal and healing waters that spring from the depths of the earth, emphasising the relationship between the health of our bodies and that of the planet.

- Rain and Other Discharges: The design of formulas to invoke rain and the fertility of the land.

- Overflows of the Repressed: on actions to liberate water bodies and dismantle the controlling ambitions of modern infrastructure projects.

- Orifices and Shared Fluids: on the use of bodily secretions as design materials.

- Pressure Valves and Overflowing Pipes: on how usually hidden elements such as pipes and valves are in fact an essential part of the architectures of the liquid, aqueous and climatic.

- Leaks and Hedonistic Waste: on design practices related to the residual, the toxic and the stinky, resulting in new material vibrations, sensations and spaces of enjoyment.

- Sensorial Prosthesis: on devices that connect bodies to multi-scalar climatic processes.

Curated by Marina Otero Verzier, Wet Dreams is the result of a collaboration between CentroCentro and MAYRIT, the Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture directed by Miguel Leiro.

Marina Otero Verzier, an architect and researcher, is a member of the Architecture and Design Advisory Committee of the Reina Sofía Museum. She was director of the master’s degree in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-23) and research director at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2015-20). Previously, she was the director of Studio-X Programming at Columbia University GSAPP. Otero has curated Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Mining and Rebellious Mountains at the Galería Municipal do Porto (2023);Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). She has curated, together with the After Belonging Agency, After Belonging at the Oslo Architecture Biennale (2016), and, together with You Mi, Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Bodies of Water at the Shanghai Art Biennale 2022, directed by Andrés Jaque. Otero has co-edited books such as Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019). She received the Harvard Wheelwright Prize in 2022.

MAYRIT is a global, biennial platform that showcases young and experimental creators working in contemporary design and architecture. Directed by Miguel Leiro and held in Madrid since 2020, it focuses on water-related issues to highlight the need to preserve our cultural and natural resources. As a decentralised network, MAYRIT fosters connections with diverse communities and offers new perspectives on the relationship between design, ecology, society and space. “Wet Dreams”, the overall theme of MAYRIT 2024, has been conceived by Marina Otero Verzier.

Partipants: Yi-Fei Chen, Matilde Cassani, Elsa Casanova Sampé, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Patricia Coelho, elii [oficina de arquitectura], Mariam Elnozahy, Pol Esteve Castelló, Marco Ferrari, Ignacio G. Galán, Elise Hunchuck, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, María Jerez, La Cuarta Piel, Elena López Riera, Miguel Montoya, Ivan L. Munuera, Marc Navarro, Claudia Paredes, Philippe Rahm, Joel Sanders, Jan Christian Schulz, Rebecca Schedler, Ariadna Silva Fernández, Ana Robles Pérez, Serina Tarkhanian, Susan Schuppli

Graphic design: Víctor Clemente
Museography: Pablo Ferreira Navone
Curatorial assistance: Ana Robles Pérez
With support from: Creative Industries Fund NL, Cultuur Eindhoven, Fundación María José Jove