May Joseph and Sofia Varino, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2023) 97pp. £38.39 Hb. ISBN: 9781032326405
In Aquatopia: Climate Interventions, May Joseph and Sofia Varino present a concise yet conceptually ambitious reflection on climate performance, colonial histories and water ecologies. Situated within Routledge’s Critical Climate Studies series, the book documents and theorises the site-specific performances of Harmattan Theatre, founded by Joseph as a ‘way of producing a conduit to engage with climate change on its terms, to ask questions of landscapes and open waters that were not possible within the confines of the stage itself’ (xv). Ranging from performances in New York and Venice to Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin, Aquatopia assembles an experimental atlas of climate intervention, in which performance becomes a method for navigating planetary crisis.
The book is structured around alternating theoretical chapters and poetic interludes. This hybrid format enacts the book’s argument that climate knowledge must emerge not only from scientific metrics or policy discourse, but from the embodied, sensorial, and performative. Joseph and Varino begin with two prologues that establish their ethical and epistemological starting points. Joseph recounts the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as the founding trauma behind Harmattan Theatre’s aquatic orientation, while Varino situates the book within the broader terrain of climate humanities and somatic ecology. From there, the chapters alternate between conceptual essays and concise accounts of Harmattan Theatre’s site-specific works, supplemented by references to digital documentation. The rhythm is more like a series of essays or field notes than a single sustained argument, which makes the book easy to enter from different points. At 120 pages, the book often gestures toward more expansive analysis than it can sustain within its modest length.
The first chapter introduces ‘Storm as Method’. Rather than treating storms as mere weather events, the authors frame them as methodological models for performance and for writing about climate change. The following interlude, Aquatopia, New York (2017), situates this claim in practice and anchors the volume’s insistence that performance can be both analytic and interventive. Though rich in metaphorical depth, the chapter remains abstract and may benefit from additional grounding in performance practice.
The second chapter, ‘Multidirectional Thalassology’, turns to comparative lagoon ecologies, tracing the resonances between Venice, Amsterdam, and Cochin. Joseph and Varino propose a ‘thalassology’ that is historical, mobile, and decolonial, mapping the flows of empire, capital, and water across postcolonial coastlines, situating it within histories of colonialism and global trade. While the comparative lens is promising, there is limited historical or ethnographic detail to develop these entanglements fully. Nonetheless, the insistence that climate cannot be separated from empire is a powerful intervention.
Chapter Three offers the clearest articulation of Harmattan Theatre’s methodology. Here, the authors frame ‘oceanic praxis’ (36) as a performance mode that resists territorial fixity and privileges movement, improvisation, and interconnection. Authors take inspiration from theatre practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Safdar Hashmi and others, when experimenting and developing strategies for such an Environmental Theatre. This section is powerful in highlighting how performance destabilises colonial cartographies and produces new spatial imaginaries where ‘Harmattan Theater begins with a site and builds performance around that site’ (44).
Chapters Four and Five shift attention to pedestrian movement or walking and environmental subjectivity. ‘Terrestrial Becomings’ (Chapter Four) explores walking as a performative method of climate engagement, drawing on traditions of ritualistic and meditative experiences, as well as eco-choreography. Varino here focuses on ‘walking as an (auto)ethnographic research method and as an aesthetic strategy in Harmattan’s oceanic praxis. In other words, what kind of political and conceptual work does walking allow us to do?’ (51). Chapter five, ‘Anthropogenic Citizens’, considers how bodies become agents of ecological storytelling through participation and presence, ‘reminding people to pause and consider the precarity of their environment’ (69). Both chapters offer provocative frameworks for thinking about climate citizenship and embodied agency.
The final chapter, ‘Queering Climate’, is the most speculative. Engaging with queer ecology, the authors argue that dominant narratives of climate urgency and solutionism must be unsettled by non-linear, non-normative imaginaries. This chapter introduces the idea of ‘historical radiance’, which is evocative, even if briefly sketched, and serves as an appropriate closing provocation. The chapter’s brevity limits its ability to fully engage with queer ecological scholarship or queer performance as a genre; however, it gestures to the kind of future directions the authors envision for climate performance.
Throughout the book, the interludes, featuring performances such as Acqua Alta (Venice, 2014), Far Rockaway (NYC, 2013), and Sea Dike (Amsterdam, 2014), are visually and conceptually compelling. They offer glimpses into Harmattan’s aesthetic repertoire. The final epilogues offer lyrical meditations on climate aesthetics, nonhuman agency, and Harmattan Theatre’s evolving practice. They reiterate the book’s central contention that ecological understanding must be embodied, sensory, and improvisational.
One of Aquatopia’s most notable achievements is its insistence on climate knowledge as a performative and affective process. In contrast to the rationalist tropes that dominate climate discourse, Joseph and Varino propose a mode of knowing that is unstable, experimental, collaborative, and oceanic. The book aligns with recent scholarship in environmental humanities that centres embodied experience, postcolonial geographies, and multispecies entanglements.
However, the book’s ambitions are somewhat constrained by its length and format. The theoretical chapters are conceptually dense, yet often too brief to fully develop their insights. The interludes, while poetic and immersive, lack critical contextualisation.
Despite these limitations, Aquatopia offers a compelling intervention into contemporary climate discourse. It not only reframes performance as a tool for ecological thought but also foregrounds the material, historical, and affective conditions of water-bound life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of performance studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial theory, as well as artists and educators experimenting with interdisciplinary climate pedagogy. In an era when climate narratives are dominated by technocratic solutions and dystopian forecasts, Aquatopia invites readers to linger in the tides where memory, history, and sensation converge. It is a book that thinks with the body, moves with the water, and insists on the imaginative potential of performance amid planetary crisis.
Snehal Anni, Freie University, Berlin.
