Coal Prize Art and Environment 2025

The immemorial cosmogonies that have come down to us all say that the origin of life is linked to water. Contemporary science confirms this. And yet, the mysteries of water cannot be exhausted. We now know that it has been omnipresent in the Universe since its very origins and that it played a decisive role in the formation of stars and galaxies. Outside our planet, the molecule has only been formally identified in its solid or gaseous states. This makes its presence in liquid form on Earth all the more remarkable. Our planet’s unique conditions allow water to trickle down. It is in its liquid form that it has been, and will continue to be, the primordial home of all life.

Every organism on Earth, from the simplest to the most complex, is “a creature of thirst”. Its unique properties, including capillarity, dissolving power, and permanent trickling make it, according to Gaston Bachelard calls it “the eye of the Earth” or “the organ of the world”. To the rhythm of its cycles, it passes from one state to another, crosses materials, connects elements, ravines mountains, draws plains, drains minerals, elevates plants, vitalizes animals, composes the climate, cooling the atmosphere and capturing carbon. Every drop of freshwater brings life to life, whether it comes from groundwater, wetlands, or surface water. Marshes, mangroves, ponds, lakes, springs, rivers and streams all play their part in biological existence.

Yet freshwater represents only a few hundredths of the water on Earth. In temperate zones, we live in the illusion of its abundance; in arid zones, we live in the knowledge of its scarcity. Water can only be shared. Anthropogenic pressure on water cycles, linked to intensive agriculture, industrial activity, urbanization, energy production and the production of most of our consumer goods, is seriously disrupting the balance. Extreme droughts and major floods, as well as chemical and plastic pollution, are the most visible indicators.

Our thirst for growth is compromising the only source capable of quenching our thirst. Aux pollutions In addition, inequalities of access – over a quarter of humanity is still deprived of drinking water – engender increasingly extreme conflicts. Thinking about a freshwater policy can only be done on a planetary scale, with a shared vision of its uses, and with a concern to repair and protect all the places where water is found: the aquifers and glaciers that store it, the wetlands that capture carbon, the mangroves that slow erosion, the rivers that drain life… More than a common good, a fundamental right of all living beings, today we need to consider it as a subject endowed with rights.

How can we envisage an ecology and politics of water without a poetics of water? Protecting water also means regenerating the imaginaries, narratives, representations and practices that condition the way it is shared and used in our lives and actions.

The COAL Prize 2025 dedicated to freshwater is a call to fight against the drying up of our sensitivities towards it, to elevate it to its rightful place at the heart of general attention, to rehabilitate it in its symbolic and sacred prerogatives, to consider it as the ally and partner of our existences. It’s also a call to protect it, to play our part in restoring its natural cycles, to repair places that have been damaged, in solidarity with those, human and non-human, who are irreparably affected.