“The song of water is an eternal thing.”

Federico Garcia Lorca

Weaving spaces of transit, exchange, and ritual, water bodies also conceal gestures of domination and fugitivity, as hydrobodies are extracted and re-routed. Their fragile connectivity tells histories of intergenerational memories and reverence, as they become the medium and refuge of existence.

Featuring a selection of non-fiction films, experimental documentaries, and artist films, this program highlights personal practices of filmmaking rooted in aquatic spaces where rituals of belonging and ancestrality take place, as bodies, language, and afterimages merge in acts of blessing, purification, fugitivity, and celebration. In doing so it counterposes modes of insurgent and resilient living that shed light on more reciprocal forms of togetherness.

Coastal erosion and rising waters question modes of sovereignty. Uncertain waters that bring adrift the vulnerability of a distant reality that hits close to home. Silent water currents that flow with violence in the Mississippi river, floods threatening from disjunct times that build the future. Moon gravitational forces that bring a multilingual ritualized tide of whispers and spirits. Steamy waterfalls that erupt from within, opening up the possibility of change.

The fluid frontiers of cinema leak within the frames, reimagining the conditions of what we feel and how we interact with it. These cinematic waters are spaces of suspension and abstraction, where new political sensibilities meander without imposing on one another. Entering the space of the sleepless, populated by afterimages and spectral hauntings, the films featured comprise formal experimentations that include double exposures, collages of archival and found footage, underwater shots, and videos that include the genealogy of the apparatus of captures and display, itself a geological entity.

Some of the films document the vulnerabilities of their subjects, while also witnessing the failure of the nation state project, in supporting the lives of those outside the center, and the overexposure to toxicity and ecosystem rupture. These films catalyze hope in the spirits bound to statelessness, as the atmospheric conditions of governance continue to spread uncertainty. Waters with souls that counter-flow the currents of the everyday. Diving within frames, underwater time slows down our body and opens up our mind. These films are Ekman[1] spirals in the bottom of the ocean, points of entry to a deeper temporality that was always there rising and falling at the mercy of the moon.

The personal and the collective intertwine with the waves of the ocean. Swimming within the five hundred and thirty years of tears and sweat from those who perished under the deck. A translucent cinema that can be smelled in the breeze, and felt with the eyes, presented in the middle of the square after centuries of plunder and disdain. These are films thought in common, felt from the bottom of the sea, and the shores of those that at a distance are closer than ever.

These visionary fictions and rituals unearth histories of concealment and occupation, giving space to weathered bodies and submerged perspectives. They present extractive histories of erasure in Latin America and in the Pacific, co-relating acts of logistical mediation with elemental fatigue, while contrasting the overexposure of images with the erosion of political systems. For how does one catalyze these processes of ungrounding and life dispossession towards more benefic imaginations and futures?

Through these films, visions of potency, and worldviews are relinquished by acts of political re-invention, whereby new vital spaces are bridged. They are hopeful breaches into newly-envisioned common futures, insurgent counter-imaginaries that review one’s relation with chronopolitics and propose an imaginative ethics for the living. These bring with them the possibility of bearing rights to mountains, rivers, and other-than-human entities, as the multi-vocalities of the living persist. Voices transduced, through mountains and jungles that erupt and salvage matters that were being abducted from them. Voices reverberating, through the turbulent tidal flows of water which speak of existence in displacement while searching for new breath. Voices that recalibrate the unspoken choirs of geological time’s synchronicity made evident through the corals’ reproductive moon dance.

Water flows, water brakes, water vows, water wins.

[1] The Ekman spiral is a consequence of the Coriolis effect, and occurs when surface water molecules move by the force of the wind, they, in turn, drag deeper layers of water molecules below them.