Photos: Lourdes Cabrera. Courtesy of TBA21 and TBA21–Academy
Organised in conjunction with the exhibition Abundant Futures: Works from the TBA21 Collection, co-produced with C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía and in collaboration with the City of Córdoba, the convening presented artistic contributions that place a wealth of visions into conversation with spaces for social and ecological renewal, inviting new forms of conviviality to emerge.
Offering new performative works, Madison Bycroft, Léo Landon Barret and Nana (Anaïs) Pinay, Seba Calfuqueo, Niño de Elche, and Laia Estruch explored forms of kinship with aquatic life through more-than-human sonority, while practicing with the vibrancy, vitality, and expressivity of their voices to forge fluidic connections. Laia Estruch and Niño de Elche used vocalization to converse with the fluvial ecosystem. When the sonic and the aural are complicit with the politics of speech and silence, the acts of speaking, uttering, and hearing become distorted by the workings of power and capital and the implications of normativity. Such disruptions are particularly relevant to Mapuche worlds, where language, ritual, and fluidity bear the resistance to Anthropocenic extractivism, dominant masculinity, and are used to destabilise gender binaries, as can be seen in Seba Calfuqueo’s performance. Uprooting traditions of fixed representations, taxonomies, and framings, Madison Bycroft, Léo Landon Barret and Nana (Anaïs) Pinay speculate together in song, sound, and story in a new work, written and choreographed for Real Jardín Botánico.
As part of Meandering, Lafawndah, Isabel Lewis, and Eduardo Navarro engaged with the rhythms and frequencies of the Guadalquivir River. Through visual, performative, and sonic registers that involve meditation, deep listening, and raving, the three artists expanded on the idea of live research—a reflection on how artistic practice can offer new sensibilities for social and environmental justice—in an inward as well as collective journey through Córdoba’s riverbank sites.
Eduardo Navarro, Riverbed Drawing Meditation (2022)
Launching with a communal breakfast and a drawing meditation session led by Navarro that attunes to how rivers breathe ocean life as arteries out of a beating heart, the day continued with a conversation between the three fellows, Markus Reymann, and myself that expanded on producing poetic tools and experiential resources for an active riverine epistemology. A new performance by Lewis explores the urban stories spoken and silenced in the archaeological artifacts connected to the Guadalquivir River as a point of departure to uncover another experience of time. Lewis’s work led to an exploration of the sonic continuum in the region’s musical trajectories performed by Lafawndah as a dance party.
Grounded in experiential, contemplative, and sensory registers, the convening outlined how knowledge and creativity can activate and inhabit imaginative journeys. An invitation from and beyond Andalusia to sense its riverine, coastal, and groundwaters, Pasaje del Agua borrowed its Spanish title from the 1976 album by the great Andalusian flamenco duo Lole y Manuel to seed a richer experience of community, a larger view of time, and mindful allegiance with all waterways.
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