ARTISTS & ARTWORKS
Sebastián Calfuqueo is a part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü and Yene Revista. From Mapuche origin, Calfuqueo’s work appeals to their cultural inheritance in order to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural and political status of the Mapuche subject in the contemporary Chilean society and Latin America. Their work includes installation, ceramics, performance and video art in order to explore the cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between indigenous and western ways of thinking. Their work has also the purpose of making the problems feminism and sexual dissidence movements present visible.
Kowkülen (Liquid Being), 2020
Video, 1920×1080, HD, 3 minutes.
Video composed by an audiovisual recording and the author’s writing.
The work goes through a bodily, personal and poetic journey regarding the water, wetlands, lakes, oceans, rivers and springs. The work addresses the concepts of body, binaries, gender, sexuality, the historical relationship between water and life, as well as their potential as a living space, necessary to the relationship of all territories.
Carolina Caycedo is a Colombian, London-born, multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, videos, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and nonhuman entities. She lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a 2021-2022 inaugural U.S. Latinx Artist Fellow and the 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Serpent River Book, 2017
Artist book, 72 page accordion fold, offset, printed canvas hardcover
Serpent River Book is a 72 page accordion fold artist-book, that combines archival images, maps, poems, lyrics, satellite photos, with the artist's own images and texts on river bio-cultural diversity, in a long and meandering collage. The fluctuating publication can frame many narratives. As a book it can be opened, pleated and read in many directions, and has a performatic potential to it, functioning as a score, or as a workshop tool. Serpent River Book gathers visual and written materials compiled by the artist while working in Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican communities affected by the industrialization and privatization of river systems.
The book is part of the ongoing body of work 'Be Dammed', that investigates the effects of extractivism on natural and social landscapes, exploring the power dynamics associated with the corporatization and decimation of water resources.
Mei-Kuei Feu is a Montreal artist, born in Taipei, she grew up on the banks of the winding, green and threatening Keelung River. Since then she has been interested in our relationship with nature and explores the sensitive aspect of water through photography, video, installation and public intervention. The realization of Eaux vives, in 2004, marked a decisive moment in this adventure. Recently, she created the blog Flux Yamaska to share stories about the Yamaska River.
FLUX, 2018
Two channel synchronized video installation, HD, stereo, duration 5 min.
Directed, designed, shot, sounded and edited by Mei-Kuei Feu. Projection synchronization programming by Paul Turcotte.
FLUX establishes a dialogue between nature and humans based on observations of the St. Lawrence River and environments built for water. It all begins with a sunrise on a lake in summer, the water tames itself, follows and undergoes a metamorphosis to end with a sunset behind an ice rink. Between light and dark, the oscillating water carries creative inspiration from one place to another. It reveals a perpetual change of the world from which springs a regenerating energy.
Genevieve Robertson is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in Environmental Studies, working between place-based, collaborative and material processes. Her work is informed by a personal and intergenerational history of resource labour in remote forestry camps all over British Columbia. Robertson’s practice explores elemental, geologic and more-than-human worlds, reckoning with the schism between primordial time and the current moment of frenzied petro-capitalism, climate change and crumbling ecologies. Robertson holds a BFA from NSCAD University (Halifax), an MFA from Emily Carr University (Vancouver), and has been supported internationally through residencies, conferences and exhibitions. Her work has been published with The Centre for Alterity Studies, The Capilano Review, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and was featured in the recent compilations Outdoor School, Fire Season and Art and Climate Change. She is of British and French ancestry and currently lives on the traditional and unceded territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx Sinixt Arrow Lakes and Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples.
Study of a Lost Shoreline, 2017-19
Handmade silt-based watercolour and ink on paper (silt collected from the Columbia River’s Rosevelt, Wanapum, McNarry and Kinbasket reservoirs), 150 drawings, 11” x 11” each
Study of a Lost Shoreline is an elegiac drawing installation informed by human-caused ecological change along the Columbia River, which begins in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and empties into the Pacific Ocean in Astoria, Oregon. The project is a contribution to "River Relations: A Beholder’s Share of the Columbia River", a two-year interdisciplinary artistic research project undertaken by a collective of artists, poets and geographers. River Relations responds to the extensive damming of the Columbia River and the current renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty, a watershed governance agreement between Canada and the United States.
Daniel Torres lives in his hometown of Bogota, where he teaches, works, and plays with 16mm film. After studying architecture in Cornell University, he has been working with analog film processes and documentary projects as well as working as a translator and designer. His work uses artisanal developing and filming processes to explore the relationship between image, materiality, and memory.
Superficies/Surfaces, 2020
22min, 16mm & Video, Residencias Walden (Residency “Desde el río”)
Exploring the Colombian Constitutional court's decision to declare the Atrato river a subject of rights, Superficies is a personal travel diary that asks the question: "How do you interview a river?" Filming the city of Quibdo, Colombia and its surroundings with a cellphone and a bolex, it approaches the river as a landscape that exists beyond its riverbanks, asking the people who live next to it how they would feel and what they would do if they were the river.