In 2011, catalan artist Maxime Berthou “performed” a successful cloud bursting gesture by launching 15 kilograms of silver iodine in the skies.
The project was called “Paparuda”, the name of a Eastern European pagan rain ritual. The consequences of this type of geo-engineering art project have rippled through time and brought us to an epoch where the rise of crypto “primitives” (coins, NFTs, DAOs) and their integration into more and more aspects of our lives have led us to understand as a parallel economy with real world consequences.
What if this parallel economy could be leveraged to push the development of large scale art projects, fund grants and interventions for those under hydric stress, and fuel a community that can act towards these goals whilst simultaneously finding economic benefits? This is the question that the new iteration of Paparuda answers, by creating a project that lives somewhere between art, finance, philanthropy, impact funding, sustainability action and the power of human coordination.
In practice, Paparuda focuses on clouds as the stateless citizens of our skies and yet both critical parts of our water management needs and geo-political actors of increasing importance.
Cloud NFTs that will finance the operations of a DAO that provides grands to a variety of projects in between art and sustainability, and by backing both the DAO and the NFTs with a token poetically pegged to the amount of drinkable water in our skies, we are putting forth a circular “arteconomy”.
Circularity
Paparuda is built on three core elements, each one functioning within its own set of rules, yet feeding each other to grow and flourish.
Clouds NFTs, generated every day from real world cloud data, are sold on auction.
Each cloud acts as a key to a DAO, where proposals are submitted and acted upon on a monthly basis. Each NFT is worth its “weight in water”, and this hydric volume is represented by the RAIN Token, a fungible token with a limited supply.
« If climate change is the shark, then water is the teeth » James P. Bruce
Water has always been a somewhat « public » ressource. Just like air, it has not become a privatized entity, by and large. Water is also a complex « hyper object » (to borrow Timothy Morton’s idiom), that can take many forms beyond its actual material states. For example it would be hard to compare a river in New Zealand with legal rights to territorial sea waters to public utility water coming out of a faucet to the mountain spring ending in a stream running through private and public land. In other words, water exists on many planes, legal, geo-political, economical, practical, religious, poetic and more.
The Paparuda project places itself squarely at the intersection of all these incarnations of water, but if anything it places itself in closest proximity to water as a means of survival, a critical ressource for humanity, and, in our current capitalocene, as a commodity. As an art project that is by definition socially engaged, Paparuda is able to translate issues between spheres, making economic issues poetic, and social justice issues economical. It is an art project is the broad sense of the term, an engagement with our time, its most critical issues, in ways that elevate the discourse beyond parties, vested interests and cronyism.