November 9–12, 2022
Convening
Córdoba, Spain
Various locations
Inspired by how waterways bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, TBA21–Academy’s new live research program Meandering, curated by Sofia Lemos, unfolds the spiritual, philosophical, and political trajectories of rivers whilst listening out for the many stories carried through tributaries, springs, streams, alluvial plains, tidal marshes, wetlands, and aquifers that cultivate the life-affirming wisdom of water. As a means of wayfinding and sense-making, it rehearses how live artistic research can encourage a relational approach to generating both inner transformation, and the conditions of possibility for social change within riverine sites.
Between November 9-12, TBA21–Academy convenes An Ocean Without Shore, an evocative waterscape that spans a free, multi-day, and city-wide conference-festival of performances, screenings, talks, meditation, LARP (live-action role playing), river-walks, communal meals, music, and poetry organized with the support from the City of Córdoba. The program moves through intergenerational conversations, stories, and exchanges between artists, activists, poets, practitioners, and thinkers that explore diverse riverine ways of being and belonging. Departing from the Guadalquivir, Andalusia’s great river, to explore expanded notions of Ocean stewardship, climate responsibility, contemporary mysticism, and renewed ritual, it proposes a space for reflection on how engaged and contemplative practice can strengthen local imaginaries, and redistribute ways of knowing within our surroundings.
An Ocean Without Shore conjures rivers as living entities, and as active political agents in environmental conflicts, rather than as resources for extraction, attending to both new and ancestral visions for justice in river governance. By holding a space of awareness that is affectively oriented to focus on love and grief for rivers, it explores the dreams, contested histories, and ideologies of belonging that bring forth connections between stress and risk in fluvial ecosystems caused by transnational violence and colonial expansion, as well as extractive economies tied to racial capitalism and ecological depredation by agribusiness and corporate interests.
Simultaneously, it follows the meandering of forces, histories, and possibilities that connect bodies, ideas, and movements in the Guadalquivir to Islamic and Jewish mysticism—whose influence on Spanish culture is significant, although little known—and to Christian ecotheosophies. Deepened by propositions from Engaged Buddhism, Indigenous worldviews and shamanic visions paired with decolonial queer practices and discourses, these perspectives offer active propositions towards unraveling our experience of the world as conditioned by separateness and differentiation.
Expressing how the Ocean can become an expanse for reconciling our relationship with ourselves and with the earth’s waterways, An Ocean Without Shore also aspires to co-create a practice and poetics of imaginative awareness for local audiences, young persons, artists, and organizations. Spanning four days, the convening comprises a series of working sessions on critical river literacy, community outreach, and capacity-building, followed by an evening program of public-facing events that offer research-driven, experiential resources for deepening our understandings of interdependent ecosystems.
By cultivating the compassion, aspiration, and motivation to inspire change, An Ocean Without Shore aims to nourish abundant world-views, offering spiritual-scientific entanglements and non-dualist philosophies to seed a wider sense of self, a richer experience of community, an expanded view of time, and the imagination to manifest inspiring visions in fellowship with every ocean, river, and waterway that connects and surrounds us.
With Edgar Calel, Carolina Caycedo, Jessica Ekomane, Sally Fenaux Barleycorn, Coco Fusco, Francisco Godoy-Vega, Lafawndah, Lanoche, Isabel Lewis, Gracia López-Anguita, Juan Lopéz Intzín, Michael Marder, Ana María Millán, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Eduardo Navarro, Claudia Pagès, Lorenzo Sandoval, Colin Self, Chaveli Sifre, and Rosa Tharrats, among others.
Meandering is conceived and curated by Sofia Lemos, with research support from Maya Saravia, coordination by Henry Eigenheer, documentation by Lourdes Cabrera, and production support from the teams at TBA21 and TBA21–Academy.
TBA21–Academy is a cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the Ocean through the lens of art to inspire care and action. For a decade, the Academy has been an incubator for collaborative research, artistic production, and new forms of knowledge by combining art and science. Meandering is its first artistic research program dedicated to waterways and freshwater ecosystems. In its initial cycle, it extends TBA21–Academy’s practices and methodologies to the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia in collaboration with the City of Córdoba.
