Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic research program Meandering (2021–23), curated by Sofia Lemos, unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the vitality of water, from source to sea. By developing critical-creative insight about the interconnectedness between land and coastal waters, freshwater, and the ocean system, the program forms a case study in regenerative cultural practice in the Guadalquivir Valley in Andalusia, Spain.
Between November 10–12, 2023, TBA21–Academy convenes a weekend-long and city-wide festival of performances, talks, meditation, river-walks, communal meals, music, and poetry along the banks of the Guadalquivir river. Third Margin Deepest Spring brings together artists, anthropologists, chefs, dancers, poets, neighbors, and metaphysical practitioners to surface genealogies and trajectories of environmental thinking in the region that connect globally with planetary life. Departing from American poet Langston Hughes’ call to root our souls “deep like the rivers,” this year’s convening invites the question, “What can rivers tell us about our roots and routes?” exploring expanded notions of ocean stewardship, climate responsibility, and contemporary ritual.
Deeply connected to the fragility of ecosystems and ecological balance, the belief systems of river valley civilizations traveled widely across historical and transnational boundaries to reach us today through song, poetry, and praise. Far from being stable, fixed entities, rivers overflow and become barren, waxing and waning their course. Their stream, much like the twelfth-century al-Andalus poet and mystic Ibn al-Arabi’s creative imagination, is of “continual change in every state and manifestation in every form.”*
How can the environmental histories of river valley civilizations, empires, nation-states, and self-governed communities help us navigate some of the challenges that lie ahead of us? Building from the 2022 conference-festival dedicated to Ibn Arabi’s shoreless reach of the creative imagination, the convening Third Margin Deepest Spring listens to our founding narratives—from the Yangtze and the Ganges to the Euphrates and the Nile and from the Guadalquivir to the Congo and the Mississippi—to develop conscious creative participation and strengthen our collective symbolic agency.
Third Margin Deepest Spring engages with cosmological myths as a transhistorical counter-proposal to the “colonization of the imaginary.”** It offers a subtle and sensorial program of public-facing events with research-driven and experiential resources for deepening our interdependence with the watershed. It also aspires to co-create a practice and poetics of imaginative awareness for local audiences, young persons, neighborhood associations, spiritual communities, designers, policymakers, and activist platforms connected to environmental struggles in the region.
By arriving at the watershed oceanically, this convening invites us to widen our thinking, to make our minds like oceans, to deepen our souls as rivers, and to connect—with conscious creative participation—the many tributaries of our shared humanity.
With: Jesús Alcaide, Gracia Lopez Anguita, Mohamad Bitari, Emanuele Coccia, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Mar Griera i Llonch, Lafawndah, Isabel Lewis with Guillermo Castro Buendía, Carlos López Campos, Javiera de la Fuente, Brooke Holmes, Helena Martos, Laila Tafur, and Rosário Vacas, Michael Taussig, Medina Tenour Whiteman, and Caique Tizzi, among others.
All events are in Spanish with simultaneous translation.
Meandering is conceived and curated by Sofia Lemos, with production support from the teams at TBA21 and TBA21–Academy and documentation by Lourdes Cabrera. The accompanying anthology Meandering: Thinking Oceanically About More-Than-Ocean, edited by Sofia Lemos, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2024.
TBA21–Academy is a cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the Ocean through the lens of art to inspire care and action. Meandering is its first artistic research program dedicated to waterways and freshwater ecosystems, extending TBA21–Academy’s practices and methodologies to the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia in collaboration with the region and the City of Córdoba.
*Ibn al-Arabi, Al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, II 313.12, cited in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989, 118.
**Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020, 66-67.
