Hydraulics of Myth: Charting Confluences of Time and Meaning Downriver of Janula and Damianakis’s Stay Hydrated

Embedded in discourses around myth is the work of figures such as Carl Jung (1959) and Joseph Campbell (1949), who used the mythic as a way of structuring and “thinking of” the human. However, the anthropological tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) points us to a different understanding of myth (per his notion of bricolage), one of “thinking with” the world. Yet this still suggests a form of concrete, albeit fragmented, materiality. Using Natalia Janula and Konstantino Damianakis’s interactive artwork Stay Hydrated (2026) as an embarkation point, we take as our objective the charting of a posthumanist and hydrofeminist conceptualisation of myth—not as a set of archetypes and forms, but rather as a confluence manifested in artistic practice: ‘a kind of “collective worlding” between differing “bodies of water”, including “with other bodies and times”’ (Astrid Neimanis quoted via Damianakis, 2026). Taking a historical-aesthetic analytical approach building on historian Fernand Braudel’s (1949) exploration of the longue durée in the history of the Mediterranean and the work of media theorists such as Siegfried Zielenski (2006), we aim to explore how contingent and ephemeral experiences flow within layers of deep time—across which, like Charon’s barge upon the Styx, myth is our conveyance.