Kultur Symposium Weimar / 2021

Water Lullabies is an artistic collaboration between Nathaly Espitia, Daniel Desiderio Páez Castillo, María Buenaventura and Quintina Valero guided by the Colombian artist and anthropologist, Trixi Allina. During the interdisciplinary workshop “Social Fabric Regeneration: Generational Ruptures and Violence”, the participating social scientists and artists had the opportunity to explore different aspects of water and food as a means to trigger reinterpretations of nature, the cosmos, the body and the senses. These explorations aimed to discover new ways to regenerate the local social fabric in a context fractured after so many generations of violence. 

Intergenerational ruptures, cyclical violence and displacement from territories, nature and surroundings put forward the question of how to rebond with the cosmos as well as how to face these fractures and propose ways to renew our social interaction in the present and in the sensitive territory through art.

Water Lullabies invites to reconnect with sensitivity to restore and regenerate social and natural connections. It invites us to return to our senses in order to identify the strengths, materials, dynamics and potentialities that each being can manifest in its cosmic place. This piece is an acoustic composition, a ritornello whose repetition marks a vital rhythm: The pulse of water that reveals the aliveness of nature.

In this artistic collective sentence, the stories told by the water, the surrounding sounds, the acute approach to our senses, and the rhythm of life and death bring to the present forgotten generations and place them in the realm of nature again. Thus the possibility to reconstruct the territory emerges in the everyday experience of the body and through the sensorial connection with water and food: Water Lullabies is not a return to an idyllic past but the possibility to embark today on the sounds brought by past generations, connect with them, bond with them and regenerate them.

Video artwork by Nathaly Espitia, Daniel Desiderio Páez Castillo, María Buenaventura, Quintina Valero and Trixi Allina