Notes from Dubai (before the flood¹)
Eugenia Lim
Published August 2024
I am writing in this
body
high
My levels are
Lately there has
been an abundance
of
rain
Cumulonimbus
regenerating,
waiting to
release
their
waters
This morning, the trucks came
to pump me up
in the gigalitres
I am destined for
a dry land
where
water
is
scarce
and
high
in salt
In a clear bottle
I
join the rest of my
body
packed in a crate with
more of myself
(andplasticballsandpolyestertoysfromaShenzhenfactory
electronicsandleisurewearassembledinBangladesh)
It is
dark
I feel
extreme cold and
extreme heat
as I am
carried by ship
over
the
Great
Ocean
Towards a
dry land
a bright place
of stratification
fluorescent
light
endless
commerce
water
water
nowhere
but
everywhere at once
In April 2024, a year after our Counterflows visit to the UAE, Dubai experienced a catastrophic flood: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68897443
(Author’s note: The first thoughts for this poem came through a writing workshop with Rahel Aima. Rahel talked about the concept of ‘terroir’ in writing and artistic practice. She asked: how does the soil, climate, rain, the hot and cold, shape cultural production?)
Biographies
Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese-Singaporean ancestry who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how migration, capital and encounter cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. Based in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri lands in the Kulin Nation, Lim has shown at the Tate Modern (GBR), LOOP Barcelona (ESP), Recontemporary (IT), Kassel Dokfest (DE), Museum of Contemporary Art (AU), ACCA (AU), FACT Liverpool (GBR), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) and EXiS (KR). She co-founded CHANNELS Festival, co-wrote and hosted Video Becomes Us on ABC iView and is a former co-director at APHIDS. Lim has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre (NY), Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio, and Gertrude Contemporary. Lim is a 2022 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow and winner of Charlottenborg Spring’s 2022 Deep Forest Art Land Award. In 2024, Lim is an AIDC Leading Light, a Frame Documentary Lab participant, and one of 10 international directors selected for the prestigious Berlinale Talents Short Form Station 2024.
Eugenia Lim is represented by STATION.