Trabalhos
23RD BIENNALE OF SIDNEY: rīvus
12 de março a 13 de junho de 2022
Sydney, Austrália
Rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems feature
in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), titled rīvus, as
dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency.
Indigenous knowledges have long understood non-human entities as
living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be
protected. But only recently have animals, plants, mountains and
bodies of water been granted legal personhood. If we can recognise
them as individual beings, what might they say?
rīvus invited several aqueous beings into a dialogue with artists,
architects, designers, scientists, and communities, entangling
multiple voices and other modes of communication to ask unlikely
questions: Can a river sue us over psychoactive sewage? Will
oysters grow teeth in aquatic revenge? What do the eels think? Are
the swamp oracles speaking in tongues? Do algae reminisce about
the days of primordial soup? Are waves the ocean’s desire? Can a
waterfall refuse gravity? Considering the water ecology’s
perspective entails a fundamental shift in understanding our
relationship with the rest of the natural world as a porous
chronicle of interwoven fates.
Rivers are the sediment of culture. They are givers of life,
routes of communication, places of ritual, sewers and mass graves.
They are witnesses and archives, our memory. As such, they have
also been co-opted as natural avenues for the colonial enterprise,
becoming sites of violent conflict driven by greed, exploitation
and the thirst to possess. Indeed, the latin root rīvus, meaning a
brook or stream, is also at the origin of the word rivalry.
The 23rd Biennale of Sydney is articulated around a series of
conceptual wetlands situated along waterways of the Gadigal,
Barramatagal and Cabrogal peoples. These imagined ecosystems are
populated by artworks, experiments, activisms and research, which
together follow the currents of meandering tributaries, expanding
out into a delta of interrelated ideas including river horror,
creek futurism, Indigenous science, cultural flows, ancestral
technologies, counter-mapping, queer ecologies, multispecies
justice, hydrofeminism, water healing, spirit streams, fish
philosophy and sustainable methods of co-existence.
Sustainability should be an action, not a theme. rīvus will
reflect on its own conditions of possibility, becoming the
catalyst for works already in progress; encouraging the use of
non-polluting materials and production processes; advocating for
locality, collectivity, collaboration and reduced waste;
acknowledging its own impact on the environment while aiming to
lower it through a systemic and creative approach.
Veja mais em
www.biennaleofsydney.art
créditos das imagens: Biennale of Sydney
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