Bocas de agua

Developed from ASOPLAYA’s photographic archive and conversations with fishers Luis Ávila and Leonardo Barranco, this evolving project traces the Ciénaga de Mallorquín through the people who have continually responded to its transformation. The archive is organized around community culture, ecosystemic labor, and changes to the landscape, accompanied by fishermen’s voices and a final reflection on the ciénaga’s future. Rather than treating the wetland as scenery or as evidence of degradation alone, the project foregrounds the practices through which fishers read, maintain, adapt to, and care for an unstable aquatic territory. The archive becomes a living ecological record in which memory, labor, community knowledge, and environmental change remain inseparable.

In a series of videos, González Vergara uses the body as an instrument for reading territory, tracing a series of bodily actions undertaken by the artist in the marshland of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta alongside fisherman Omar Jiménez. Moving through stilt structures, measuring water, adjusting his body to unstable surfaces, Vergara inhabits these spaces from within. The titles of the individual works describe elementary gestures of orientation and adaptation, shifting attention from observing a landscape to negotiating one’s position within it. Presented alongside audio interviews with members of ASOPLAYA, the videos establish a dialogue between two Caribbean wetland territories, bringing together different forms of situated knowledge: one approached through bodily experimentation, the other through the accumulated memory and ecological labor of fishing communities.

Marilyn Boror Bor’s practice has long addressed water, dispossession and territorial defense in Guatemala, particularly in relation to the impacts of cement production and the struggles surrounding water in her community of San Juan Sacatepéquez. In this work, cement becomes the material expression of a model of progress that covers, hardens and displaces relations once sustained through water, land, and communal life. The ultramarine pigment in the concrete blocks evokes both the color culturally associated with water, and the deep chromatic memory of Maya blue, turning the material into a paradoxical image of water that has lost its movement, depth, and vitality. The work holds together two opposing material logics – immobilisation and continuity – while situating water as a site of memory, conflict, and collective defense.

With KOWKÜLEN, Seba Calfuqueo develops a bodily and poetic relation to water from a Mapuche perspective. Filmed in the region of Araucanía, the artwork places the artist’s body in direct relation with water while addressing gender fluidity, territory and the historical connections between water and life. Rather than treating water as an external landscape, Calfuqueo approaches it as a living space necessary to the relations that sustain territories. The work also resonates with the extractive pressures placed on Mapuche lands and waters, where forestry, privatisation and colonial histories shape access to ecological life. Body and water meet here without becoming identical, instead altering the terms through which the other can be perceived.

Carolina Caycedo’s constellation of artworks emerge from long-term research into rivers, dams, extraction and the privatisation of water across Abya Yala. Serpent River Book unfolds as a 72-page accordion publication combining maps, archival material, poems, satellite imagery and research gathered through Caycedo’s long-term work with communities living along rivers in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, including those affected by large infrastructure projects. Maligna and Multiple Clitoris draw on photographs taken at the Iguazú Falls on the Argentina-Brazil border. Through mirroring and recomposition, the artist transforms cascading water into unstable bodily forms, presenting rivers and waterfalls as living agents rather than passive landscapes. The book behaves like a meandering archive, while the suspended images give water a corporeal and liquid presence that resists the logics of containment, extraction and control.

Manuel Chavajay’s paintings register the apparent movement of mountains and volcanoes around Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán as light, rain, mist, wind and nighttime continually alter perception. Burnt petroleum-derived oil becomes a paradoxical material for recording fleeting atmospheric changes: an industrial residue used to render a landscape understood as living and communicative. Qatee ya’ emerges from a dream by Cheen Chavajay in which, while sitting at the edge of the lake, a woman carrying firewood and flowers appears, asks for honey, and identifies herself as “grandmother water”. Together, the artworks approach water through kinship and reciprocity, shifting the lake from landscape to a living presence with whom relations can be sustained.

The constellation of photographs presented by davi de jesus do nascimento bring family archive, riverine labor and bodily transformation into a single field. davi’s family history is inseparable from the São Francisco River in the region of Minas Gerais: generations of washerwomen, fishers, carpenters, and boatmen pass through his practice, alongside memories of flooding and displacement. In corpo-embarcação, the body becomes a vessel through a ritual relation with the carranca, the carved figure that traditionally protects river boats. In pesca farta, the artist’s body meets the body of a fish in an image of abundance, capture and transformation. Rather than treating the archive as evidence of a closed past, davi allows photographs and river memories to flow into one another as parts of a living barranqueiro world.

Conceived with community leader and Indigenous territorial-rights defender Abelino Chub Caal, Ríos de gente emerged from collective actions in Guatemalan communities affected by mining, hydroelectric projects, river diversion and contamination. In this communal action, more than a thousand participants walked on places where waterways had been damaged, diverted or rendered inaccessible, forming human currents that made absent rivers visible again. The resulting installation combines professional documentation with images recorded by participants, dispersing the authority of a single camera. Bodies become a temporary river – not to replace the water that has been lost, but to insist on its social, territorial, and political presence. The work binds water justice to Indigenous rights, collective action, and the refusal of water as commodity.

Filmed at Laguna Guaniquilla in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s video belongs to Observatorio de lagunas, a long-term project that connects two meanings of laguna in Spanish – a coastal ecosystem shaped by tidal movement, and a gap in memory. The Super 8 film was developed by hand, allowing water to enter the image as a material agent in its production, whereby stains, shifts and chemical instability become part of the film’s memory. The work links Caribbean geological time, ecological transformation and historical erasure, approaching the moving image as a porous archive in which place participates in the conditions of its own representation.

Transformations grew from Nadia Huggins’s observation of coral-reef deterioration, and of her own body becoming weightless and visually unstable underwater. Across the series of photographs, the artist’s body is paired with marine organisms, producing diptychs in which distinct forms approach one another across a narrow interval without fully merging. That gap becomes a threshold – between submersion and resurfacing, self and ecosystem, bodily transformation and ecological change. Underwater, ordinary categories of identity and social visibility are temporarily displaced, while the reef records environmental change over time. Huggins’s images propose relation without sameness, allowing human and more-than-human bodies to remain different while becoming mutually perceptible through water.

Developed specifically for Bocas de agua, teníamos bocas de ceniza extends processes first explored in the artist’s previous work  SORBO (2025). The project proposes a collective gathering at Punta Roca, where the Magdalena River deposits part of what it carries: trunks, roots, branches, timber, and remnants of objects whose origins or functions can no longer be identified. Through conversations and a shared examination of the found material, the action culminates in an open invitation to arrange the driftwood and other materials within the exhibition space. Leguízamo understands eroded wood as a record of what the river knows and says, shaped by currents, sediment, vibration, and passage. In the gallery, this accumulation is conceived as a dry riverbed that retains the forms and memories of water. Here, natural forces converge with traces of human, industrial and extractive activity that the river carries along, and ultimately returns.

Hidro-Cortex grows from Manes’s use of gyotaku, a Japanese printing technique in which ink is applied directly to a fish and transferred onto paper, preserving the imprint of its body. In Manes’s practice, the print functions as evidence of a broader lived process. Fishing, cooking, eating, conversation and chance become ways of producing knowledge about territory and of questioning where the artwork resides – in the object, in the action, or in the shared experience that surrounds it. The imprint records the physical presence of the fish while pointing beyond itself to the encounter through which it was made. For Bocas de agua, the installation draws on Manes’s experience as an artist, fisherman, and chef from Barranquilla, and on his relationship with Bocas de Ceniza, where river and sea meet.

KATAMAKU – meaning “to become silence” in the language of Kokonuko communities of Cauca – emerges from a process of learning with plants, dreams, lagoons and the Consejo de Mayores of Nasa, Yanakuna, and Kokonuko communities. Nomasmetaforas describes the forms produced through this process as relational interfaces: non-extractive technologies for dreaming and conversing with plant intelligences. El Jaguar Azul is one such dream-generated presence, materialised through clitoria flowers, coca, and toé. Across both artworks, water is approached as a subject-in-relation rather than an inert resource. As a collective, Nomasmetaforos propose a movement away from simply granting water a human model of rights, and toward relations that exceed the autonomous subject. Here, listening, silence, dreams, plant knowledge and territorial responsibility are part of an exercise in political imagination that moves away from domination, guiding us toward frameworks of reciprocity.

Enciclopedias de Río (Historias Líquidas) is an expanded archive built from boat journeys that Christian Salablanca Díaz took with his father, and the knowledge transmitted orally while navigating rivers and coastal routes. Stories of fish, mangrove species, canoe-making, and fishing practices become drawings, turning the panga into a moving encyclopedia, and the river journey into an open-air school. Desbocar un río extends this archive by bringing painted fauna into direct relation with fishing line and hooks. Tools associated with survival and food sovereignty move toward sculpture without losing the memory of their use. Representation, object, species, and oral knowledge are held together as a relational archive in which learning occurs through movement across water, and across generations.