Photos: Lourdes Cabrera. Courtesy of TBA21–Academy
Program trailer. Video and editing by Lourdes Cabrera.
As a space of seaborne sociality that reveals our fundamental interconnectedness, Arabi’s proposal for the creative imagination forms a scene of encounter between the subtle and the sensible. This imaginative awareness enables us to release the false dualisms such as world-self, or nature-culture, that both frame the world as distinct parts, disconnected and independent from the whole, and condition our ability to act within it.
By encouraging a relational poetics between inner transformation and social change, Arabi’s verses heighten our capacities to transform the outer realities that envelop us—asking us what it means to dream today, and which capacities or resources might be needed for us to realize more ecologically sound and socially just worlds. Could such experiences of relational insight, linked to a metaphysics of the Ocean, deepen and enrich our presents for more loving communities and desirable oceanic futures?
Part of Meandering, An Ocean Without Shore moved 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 River in Andalusia, to explore expanded notions of Ocean stewardship, climate responsibility, contemporary mysticism, and renewed ritual, it proposed moods and rhythms for reflection on how engaged and contemplative practice can strengthen social imaginaries, and redistribute ways of knowing within our surroundings.
Edgar Calel, Nab’ey Taj Job’ / The First Rains (2022)
The performative ritual Nab’ey Taj Job’ / The First Rains was an offering to the Guadalquivir River inspired by the aliveness of rivers as they transform the verticality of falling rain into the horizontality of their flow. Three sculptures were crafted from the waters of the Guadalquivir, frozen into the form of the hieroglyph representing the Nahual Imox, a Mayan symbol, or the water cycle. These sculptures were subsequently presented to the very river from which they originated. The river gradually absorbed them along its course.
Spanning four days, the convening also comprised a series of working sessions on critical river literacy, community outreach, and capacity-building with young persons, artists, and organizations, followed by an evening program of public-facing events that offer research-driven, experiential resources for deepening our understandings of interdependent ecosystems.
Interview with Sally F. Barleycorn
Each day a communal meal invited collaborators and communities involved in Meandering to gather around the table. These meals featured menus conceived by the commissioned artists in collaboration with local farmers and producers, coordinated by Córdoban chef and restaurateur Gabrielle Mangeri. Inspired by the Guadalquivir River’s rich history of spiritual, ecological, and cultural exchange, the occasions encompassed acts of cooking and eating where food became not only a source of bodily nourishment but also a means of sharing and producing knowledge that strengthened connections between diverse ways of relating to the world. These communal meals provided a context for a sensorial journey that delved into some of the complexities of both food and politics, all the time striving to imagine how the watershed and a shared human history could be tangibly experienced.
The convening also included talks and critical-creative discourse. Juan López Intzín shared a conceptual system known as “epistemologies of the heart,” an important axis of Mayan culture, cosmology, and worldview. Through a decolonial critique of being, Intzín’s proposal probes autonomy, the recognition of all living beings, and the harmonious relationships between humans and their surroundings by cultivating the ability to sentipensar (feelthink). The latter, Intzín tells us, requires a connection from the heart with nature as a whole.
Ana María Millán, Becoming Riverine LARP
ReadRelated