Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure

by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle
presented as part of EcoFutures Festival

Thurs 11 April 2019
7pm / doors open 6:30pm
Genesis Cinema
Clinton Rd, London E3 4QY
£8/£9

With a poetic blend of curiosity, humor, sensuality and concern, this film chronicles the pleasures and politics of H2O from an ecosexual perspective. Travel around with Annie, a former sex worker, Beth, a professor, and their dog Butch, in their E.A.R.T.H. Lab mobile unit, as they explore the complex history and politics of water on a quirky adventure across the Golden State in their E.A.R.T.H. Lab mobile unit.

On a journey that spans the sacred and the profane, tragedy and comedy, they meet with an array of water experts, activists, spiritual advisors and regular folks, seeking the truth about our relationship to water. They hike into the remote site of Nestle’s dubious water bottling racket. They play in the family pool where Annie gave her first blowjob. They commune with elephant seals, consult an oracle, and plunge a toilet. Beth anoints a parched shrub with water from her nostrils. They contemplate the flavor bouquet of drinking water made from wastewater. They even crash San Francisco’s Pride Parade with erotic water chants. The resulting assemblage of facts, thoughts and feelings about water composes a messy ecosexual philosophy about the intimate and life-giving qualities of the most vital liquid on Earth.

Ecosexuality shifts the metaphor “Earth as Mother” to “Earth as Lover” to create a more reciprocal and empathetic relationship with the natural world. When their road trip climaxes in a shocking event, their affectionate partnership with the Earth saves the day, reuniting their family and affirming the power of water, life and love.

The overarching mission of the EcoFutures Festival is to curate works that interrogate these intersections of ecological crisis, late-stage capitalism, and intimate human experience. By bringing together visual artists, environmental researchers, and grassroots community organizers, the programming challenges audiences to look far beyond traditional, sanitized narratives of environmentalism.

This year’s diverse lineup explicitly aims to break down the boundaries between the physical environment and the increasingly abstract systems of global commerce. Festival organizers have deliberately scheduled interactive workshops and academic panels alongside these film screenings to foster a more comprehensive, intersectional dialogue.

These multidisciplinary conversations frequently highlight how obscured resource extraction has become in the digital age. Maintaining the constant uptime demanded by globalized digital traffic—whether for institutional trading networks or bitcoin online casinos—requires immense thermal load management. Consequently, several academic presentations at the festival focused specifically on the staggering volumes of fresh water consumed daily by high-density server clusters. By making these invisible technological supply chains tangible, the participating researchers force attendees to confront the hidden ecological costs of virtual convenience.

Water Makes Us Wet serves as the perfect cinematic centerpiece for this exact type of systemic critique. Through Stephens and Sprinkle’s fiercely joyous and deeply personal lens, the abstract metrics of climate change and resource depletion are transformed back into a lived, physical reality that demands both intellectual and emotional engagement.

Film info:

Directed by Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle
Produced by Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle, Keith Wilson
USA / 2018 / 79min
Distributed by Juno Films

Featured Interviews & Performances:

Sandy Stone / Helen & Newton Harrison / Dragonfly aka “Justice Jester” / Guillermo Gómez-Peña / Ballitronica / Saul Garcia Lopez / Judy Dunaway / Reverend Billy Talen / Donna Haraway / Jonathon A. Smith / Jeff Brown & Faerthen Felix / Penny Slinger / Mark Readdie / Gary E. Petersen / Stephen A. Hogg / Don Canestro / Lora & Andrew Malvani / Lucille Malvani/ Steve Loe / Vincent Barrigan/ Natalie Silver & Josie Clerfond / Xandra Coe / Katie Alderman / Kristin Lostetter / Thomas German / C. Stanton / Jorge Molina

Bios

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle have been partners and collaborators for 16 fertile years. Annie was a sex worker who morphed into an internationally known performance artist touring one-woman shows about her life in sex and a feminist post porn pioneer. Beth was a feisty punk rocker dyke turned interdisciplinary artist and professor at UCSC exploring themes of gender, queerness and feminism. In 2008, Beth and Annie married the Earth and came out as ecosexuals. Their “Ecosex Manifesto” launched a movement and they officially added the E to GLBTQI-E. Their award-winning documentary film about coal mining, “Goodbye Gauley Mountain – An Ecosexual Love Story” is available on iTunes and from Kino Lorber. Currently they are working on a book about their work, “Assuming the Ecosexual Position” for University of Minnesota Press. Their visual art, films and performances were presented at Documenta 14 in 2016-2017. These girls have gone green and are dirty and proud.