dreaming towards intimacy and contaminationAn artistic research along the Orinoco and the IJssel
This project is an artistic research along the Orinoco delta and the IJssel river. Focusing on rivers as living, historical complex entities, evolving spaces and agents; recognising their histories, cultures, traumas and secrets. Expressed as an invitation to question the haunting presence of past traumas, forgotten, repressed or denied histories. Decolonial epistemologies emphasize that the formation of the modern world is inextricable from the violent processes of colonial expansion, evidenced in our modern/western attitudes towards rivers and waters. The project urgently calls for an embrace of unknowing through a dynamic exploration of embodied knowledge, materiality, memory, and submerged narratives. Shining a light upon the urgency of returning to a relational understanding of water. To question the conventional narratives of modernity that have historically marginalized non western and non human ways of being and knowing. To urge a rethinking of ownership and agency, towards; thinking with water. Emphasising how the fluidity and turbulence of waterways are agents to escape from colonial structures.
Premiered at EYE film museum, ‘Research Labs’ Jan 2025
[watch video here]
[link to research zine]