At TBA21 Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, we believe in art as a carrier of social and environmental transformation and change. In our 20th anniversary year, we are placing an intention with our programs in Madrid, Venice, and Córdoba to engage with radical sensitivity in modes of storytelling, community-building, and world-making that are more sustainable, accessible, collaborative, regenerative, and caring.
Curated by Sofia Lemos and Daniela Zyman, “Pasaje del Agua/The Journeying Stream” is a three-day program of performances, meditation, music, and conversations convened jointly by TBA21 and TBA21–Academy.
The weekend proposes performative works by Allora & Calzadilla; Madison Bycroft, Léo Landon Barret, and Nana (Anaïs) Pinay; Seba Calfuqueo; Niño de Elche; Laia Estruch; Lafawndah; Isabel Lewis; Eduardo Navarro; and contributions by Marina Avia; Barbara Casavecchia; Soledad Gutiérrez; Sofia Lemos; Olaf Nicolai; Plata; Diana Policarpo; Markus Reymann; Matthew Ritchie; Daniel Steegmann Mangrané; Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza; and Daniela Zyman.
Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Abundant Futures: Works from the TBA21 Collection, co-produced with C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía and in collaboration with the City of Córdoba, the program presents artistic contributions that place a wealth of visions into conversation with spaces for social and ecological renewal, inviting new forms of conviviality to emerge.
Offering new performative works, Madison Bycroft, Seba Calfuqueo, Niño de Elche, and Laia Estruch explore forms of kinship with aquatic life through more-than-human sonority, while practicing with the vibrancy, vitality, and expressivity of their voices to forge fluidic connections. Laia Estruch and Niño de Elche both use vocalization to converse with the fluvial ecosystem and its avifauna. When the sonic and the aural are complicit with the politics of speech and silence, the acts of speaking, uttering, and hearing become distorted by the workings of power and capital and the implications of normativity. Such disruptions are particularly relevant to Mapuche worlds, where language, ritual, and fluidity bear the resistance to Anthropocenic extractivism, dominant masculinity, and are used to destabilize gender binaries, as can be seen in Seba Calfuqueo’s performance. Uprooting traditions of fixed representations, taxonomies, and framings, Léo Landon Barret, Madison Bycroft, and Nana (Anaïs) Pinay speculate together in song, sound, and story in a new work, written and choreographed for the Royal Botanical Gardens.
A day-long offering organized by TBA21–Academy unfolds the spiritual, philosophical, and political trajectories of the Guadalquivir River and introduces the new three-year live research program “Meandering,” expanding from the ocean into rivers, tributaries, springs, streams, alluvial plains, tidal marshes, wetlands, groundwaters, and aquifers, as well as the physical and spiritual water elements that connect all planetary life. Rehearsing how the combined forces of engaged and contemplative practices might reorient hope and reimagine possibility, Meandering invites its fellows, Lafawndah, Isabel Lewis, and Eduardo Navarro to engage with the rhythms and frequencies of the Guadalquivir, Andalucía’s great river. Through visual, performative, and sonic registers that involve meditation, deep listening, and raving, the three artists expand on the idea of live research in an inward as well as collective journey through Córdoba’s riverine sites.
Launching with a communal breakfast and a drawing meditation session led by Navarro that attunes to how rivers breathe ocean life as arteries out of a beating heart, the day continues with a conversation between the three fellows, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Markus Reymann, and Sofia Lemos that expands on oceanic thinking about more-than-oceans and how it can inform new poetic tools and experiential resources for an active riverine epistemology. A new performance by Lewis explores the urban stories spoken and silenced in the archaeological artifacts connected to the Guadalquivir River as a point of departure to uncover another experience of time. Lewis’ performance is followed by an exploration of the sonic continuum in the region’s musical trajectories performed by Lafawndah as a dance party that celebrates the meanders of life, love, and knowledge in Córdoba to deconstruct perceptions that affect our ability to act in the world.
Grounded in experiential, contemplative, and sensory registers, the program outlines how knowledge and creativity can activate and inhabit imaginative journeyings through and with rivers. An invitation from and beyond Andalucía to sense its riverine, coastal, and groundwaters, “Pasaje del Agua” borrows its title from the 1976 album by the great Andalusian flamenco duo Lole y Manuel to seed a richer experience of community, a larger view of time, and the aspiration to manifest abundance with all waterways.
The Journeying Stream: An Evening at C3A
Allora & Calzadilla: mains hum
Seba Calfuqueo: Water is also territory (Ko ta mapungey ka)
June 3, 5:30–8:30pm
Centro Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A), Córdoba, Carmen Olmedo Checa
Niño de Elche: ma’ ma’ aíma
June 3, 9:30pm
Molino de Martos, 30 Calle Ronda de los Mártires, 14002 Córdoba
Eduardo Navarro: River-Heart
June 4, 9–11am
Sotos de la Albolafia, Córdoba
Meandering In-Conversation
June 4, 12–2pm
Palacio de Orive, 2 Plaza de Orive, 14002 Córdoba
Isabel Lewis: Urban Flourishing
June 4, 7–9pm
Museo Arqueológico de Córdoba, 7 Plaza de Jerónimo Páez, 14003 Córdoba
Lafawndah: Ancestral Rave
June 4, 11pm–1am
Laia Estruch: Ocells Perduts V67
June 5, 10–11am
Sotos de la Albolafia, Córdoba
Riverwalk by Seba Calfuqueo
June 5, 11am–12pm
Sotos de la Albolafia, Córdoba
Sweet Encounters
June 5, 5–7pm
Casa Árabe, 9 Calle Samuel de los Santos y Gener, 14003 Córdoba
Léo Landon Barret, Madison Bycroft, Nana (Anaïs) Pinay: Carried Away – Beyond a Rooted Condition
June 5, 9:30–10:30pm
Real Jardín Botánico de Córdoba, s/n Avenida Linneo, 14004 Córdoba
