Las Memorias Del Rio Aguas (2023)
Artistic residence and performance
in collaboration with
Laboratory of Rooted imagination
Notes from my diary, as
project manager and director
What is expected from me?
To be in charge, to direct, to facilitate. According to definition: to make something possible or easier.
How to let go of these expectations while fulfilling them, while still being in charge and being responsible of a collective process?
How to empower people, to let their ideas flourish, to give them space, while make them aware they can count on a bird-view vision of the group creation?
A scary place to be, the oscillation between authority and horizontality.
Optional outcomes which would become my nightmares:
Unreadable melting pot - hierarchized effective creation
How to creatively research the humus in-between these options.
Taking risks is all that counts.
I need to be wet before the process
I’ll be following the water
It speaks to me: the places, the dimensions, where will we perform?
Keywords after walking to the birthplace of the river:
chalk - rain - seaweed - panels - goats - pond - ram - wounds - stories - one of the exits -
human conception of birth - it’s everything that comes from a hole - fluid dynamic - mill - ecosystem -
the river begins earlier - treasure - asequiero
Dimensions to explore – Present/Physical/Real – Future/Imaginative
--------------------------------------------------------
The performance, Las memorias del Río Aguas, invites the audience to a hike through Los Molinos del Río Aguas, engages the audience on a journey to look for a drop of water flowing up. Defying gravity. Doing the impossible. Rebelling. Defending itself. Getting sucked up. Getting pumped up. Pumping itself up thrugh its own force like the water in Los Molinos from Río Aguas to the houses of its residents pushes itself through the ram pump. On their journey they find a group of self-proclaimed activists who are there to defend the river, in search for a direct action, in search for purpose and there to do something against the ecocide. This group quickly looses themselves in the experience of heat and drought, a journey inwards begins in which the activists are getting existential about experiencing the effects of privatized, accumulated and power-directed water flows of which most people are exempted. It is hard to stay at the margins, in which these effects are sensible first. Next to Spain and France exhausting themselves in games of green growth and police violence supervised by the EU, there are strange bird creatures eating the guts of a colonizer dude from the UK who came to Almeria and to Sunseed to plant Prosopis and thereby save the region from desertification. The birds chant cryptical ancestral territorial knowledges and predict the future to be red through capital driven human interventions. When the birds turn slowly on the audience to read some more guts (?), the poet leads them to the maze in which they re-encounter the activist group which has still not lost their zest for action. The group starts entering the maze and transforms themselves into a stream of consciousness, moving back and forth, connecting synapses, exchanging arguments, battling for reason, sense, legitimacy and purpose. Wondering what kinds of actions, if any, make sense. No common conclusion is reached. An opera song starts, while the activists are shedding tears, laying them carefully into the middle of the maze. The poet ends on: The only thing we can do is share our water even though our only water might be the tears we shed for the bodies of water we lost in the fight.
Artistic residence and performance
in collaboration with
Laboratory of Rooted imagination
Notes from my diary, as
project manager and director
What is expected from me?
To be in charge, to direct, to facilitate. According to definition: to make something possible or easier.
How to let go of these expectations while fulfilling them, while still being in charge and being responsible of a collective process?
How to empower people, to let their ideas flourish, to give them space, while make them aware they can count on a bird-view vision of the group creation?
A scary place to be, the oscillation between authority and horizontality.
Optional outcomes which would become my nightmares:
Unreadable melting pot - hierarchized effective creation
How to creatively research the humus in-between these options.
Taking risks is all that counts.
I need to be wet before the process
I’ll be following the water
It speaks to me: the places, the dimensions, where will we perform?
Keywords after walking to the birthplace of the river:
chalk - rain - seaweed - panels - goats - pond - ram - wounds - stories - one of the exits -
human conception of birth - it’s everything that comes from a hole - fluid dynamic - mill - ecosystem -
the river begins earlier - treasure - asequiero
Dimensions to explore – Present/Physical/Real – Future/Imaginative
--------------------------------------------------------
The performance, Las memorias del Río Aguas, invites the audience to a hike through Los Molinos del Río Aguas, engages the audience on a journey to look for a drop of water flowing up. Defying gravity. Doing the impossible. Rebelling. Defending itself. Getting sucked up. Getting pumped up. Pumping itself up thrugh its own force like the water in Los Molinos from Río Aguas to the houses of its residents pushes itself through the ram pump. On their journey they find a group of self-proclaimed activists who are there to defend the river, in search for a direct action, in search for purpose and there to do something against the ecocide. This group quickly looses themselves in the experience of heat and drought, a journey inwards begins in which the activists are getting existential about experiencing the effects of privatized, accumulated and power-directed water flows of which most people are exempted. It is hard to stay at the margins, in which these effects are sensible first. Next to Spain and France exhausting themselves in games of green growth and police violence supervised by the EU, there are strange bird creatures eating the guts of a colonizer dude from the UK who came to Almeria and to Sunseed to plant Prosopis and thereby save the region from desertification. The birds chant cryptical ancestral territorial knowledges and predict the future to be red through capital driven human interventions. When the birds turn slowly on the audience to read some more guts (?), the poet leads them to the maze in which they re-encounter the activist group which has still not lost their zest for action. The group starts entering the maze and transforms themselves into a stream of consciousness, moving back and forth, connecting synapses, exchanging arguments, battling for reason, sense, legitimacy and purpose. Wondering what kinds of actions, if any, make sense. No common conclusion is reached. An opera song starts, while the activists are shedding tears, laying them carefully into the middle of the maze. The poet ends on: The only thing we can do is share our water even though our only water might be the tears we shed for the bodies of water we lost in the fight.
