Camila Kh
@camilakh
Camila Kh
As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: “Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
invading Roman soldiers using swimming as a military tactic and appropriated native sacred springs
The story of swimming – Outdoor Swimming Society
Victorian Bathing Machines
The Diving Stage
When we pool our resources, we bring distinct flows together and hold them so that they have more effect. In carpooling, it's the people who are being pooled into one vehicle, although the parking lot may be said to be a pool of cars. A public pool brings together the reserves of the whole community.
The Architecture of Bathing: body, landscape,
... See moreThere is also plentiful evidence of members’ utter dedication to the club through the decades; when times were hard, it kept going largely thanks to their efforts. Building walls, laying lawns, clearing scrub, selling geraniums, mending deck chairs, re-tiling roofs, fixing frozen pipes, designing diving boards, establishing native plants and trees,... See more
New book celebrates 100 years of Henleaze Swimming Club – Outdoor Swimming Society
As public spaces they serve as an embodied and participatory democracy. While the forms of swimming pool, sauna and sento may be robust and enduring, they rely on active participants and defenders on location to survive. In the relative vulnerability of the sauna or the swimming pool, we are permitted to imagine and test new behaviours and form new... See more
The architecture of swimming – Outdoor Swimming Society
we are physically bare, made equal, not many symbols of social status can exist at the pool. (no purse, car, makeup, hairstyle…). gathering around water (fluid body) allows you to reflect on shifting norms ?
Allotments are sanctuaries for growing, often on the fringes of suburbia, where life is getting ever more stressful and expensive. Here, a simple urge to grow-your-own or become self-sufficient, brings us closer to a community of people, wildlife and plants that are often more diverse than the cities and towns that surround them. An allotment is a... See more
The Allotment | Colin Ward, David Crouch | London Review Bookshop
These are unique and precious forms of public space where the body in relation cannot be forgotten.
The architecture of swimming – Outdoor Swimming Society
Bathing spaces work directly and evidently with the body, it is a direct relationship, response. At the swimming you become conscious, self-aware because of your lack of clothing but also because of the architecture. This self-awareness doesn’t happen so much in natural swimming spots, at the beach, by the river, the pond… because in that situation you are focusing on the natural environment more than yourself, there’s a much larger distraction. The pool is inherently a stage, a performative platform for the swimmer to stand out.