The Journeying Stream
3-5 June 2022
Pasaje del Agua | The Journeying Stream is a three-day program of performances, meditation, music, and conversations convened jointly by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and TBA21–Academy to celebrate the practices that make up the Foundation’s collaboration with the City of Córdoba, Andalucía. Centering the journeys of bodies and ideas across layers of time and textures of life, Pasaje del Agua presents proposals for how the arts contribute to imagining flourishing ways of living, repairing social imaginaries, and remediating the relationship between climate and creativity.
Curated by Sofia Lemos and Daniela Zyman and organized in conjunction with the exhibition Abundant Futures: Works from the TBA21 Collection at C3A, co-produced with C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía and in collaboration with the City of Córdoba, the program presents 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, Seba Calfuqueo, Niño de Elche, and Laia Estruch explore 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 both use vocalization to converse with the fluvial ecosystem and its avifauna. 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 destabilize gender binaries, as can be seen in Seba Calfuqueo’s performance. Uprooting traditions of fixed representations, taxonomies, and framings, Léo Landon Barret, Madison Bycroft, and Nana (Anaïs) Pinay speculate together in song, sound, and story in a new work, written and choreographed for the Royal Botanical Gardens.
A day-long offering organized by TBA21–Academy unfolds the spiritual, philosophical, and political trajectories of the Guadalquivir River and introduces the new three-year live research program Meandering, expanding from the Ocean into rivers, tributaries, springs, streams, alluvial plains, tidal marshes, wetlands, groundwaters, and aquifers, as well as the physical and spiritual water elements that connect all planetary life. Rehearsing how the combined forces of engaged and contemplative practices might reorient hope and reimagine possibility, Meandering invites its fellows, Lafawndah, Isabel Lewis, and Eduardo Navarro to engage with the rhythms and frequencies of the Guadalquivir, Andalucía’s great river. Through visual, performative, and sonic registers that involve meditation, deep listening, and raving, the three artists expand on the idea of live research—a reflection on how artistic practice can offer new sensibilities for social and environmental justice through scholarly, sensorial, and spiritual approaches to inquiry and proposition—in an inward as well as collective journey through Córdoba’s riverine sites.
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 continues with a conversation between the three fellows, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Markus Reymann, and Sofia Lemos that expands on oceanic thinking about more-than-oceans and how it can inform new 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 leads to an exploration of the sonic continuum in the region’s musical trajectories performed by Lafawndah as a dance party that celebrates the meanders of life, love, and knowledge in Córdoba to deconstruct perceptions that affect our ability to act in the world.
Grounded in experiential, contemplative, and sensory registers, the program outlines how knowledge and creativity can activate and inhabit imaginative journeyings through and with rivers. An invitation from and beyond Andalucía to sense its riverine, coastal, and groundwaters, Pasaje del Agua borrows its 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 the aspiration to manifest abundance with all waterways.
Link to full program: here