Attachment to Land: Carolina Caycedo "The Collapse of A Model" feat. Marina Magalhaes und Samad Guerra

22.03.2019 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Carolina Caycedo

Carolina Caycedo touches in her art practice upon environmental topics and participates in movements advocating territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Her special focus gained rivers, the bloodstreams of Earth which sustain humanity and other form of beings. In many parts of the world this complex ecosystems are threatened through pollution and industrialization.
Caycedo together with the dancers Marina Magalhaes and Samad Guerra inivite the audience to a participatory performance which refers to the recent failing dams that are crumbling around the world, such as HidroItuango in Colombia, the Brumadinho tailing dams in Brazil, the Oroville dam in California, the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy in Laos, and the Patel dam in Kenya.
After the performance Carolina Caycedo will present her meandering artist’s book “Serpent River Book”. It is a 72 page accordion fold artist-book, that combines archival images, maps, poems, lyrics, satellite photos, with the artist’s own images and texts on river bio-cultural diversity, in a long and meandering collage. The fluctuating publication can frame many narratives. As a book it can be opened, pleated and read in many directions, and has a performatic potential to it, functioning as a score, or as a workshop tool. Serpent River Book gathers visual and written materials compiled by the artist while working in Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican communities affected by the industrialization and privatization of river systems.

In 2012 Carolina Caycedo was a grant-holder of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program

»Attachment to Land« is a series of talks and presentations amongst others with Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Carolina Caycedo, Ewa Ciepielewska, Aleksandra Jach and Xu Tan.

This series of events is centered around the question of the land. In the years to come, migrant flows will only increase as a result of climate change. People are being forced to leave their lands by the extreme weather conditions as well as the extractivist politics of governments and corporations. Those who do stay have to make up new ways of living and acts of resistance. But how this can be done is neither from a global perspective in the form of post-national institutional bodies, nor as a return to nation-state politics and ethnic roots: none of the existing models can provide a solution for planetary challenges. Climate change is not an abstraction, but a material phenomenon which wipes out any walls or borders trying to prevent the flows of people.

This is why the question of land needs to be disjointed from inoperative modern categories and economies, and instead thought through material-spiritual practices of everyday life. The artists invited to this series will touch upon alternative ways of attachment to land; they draw from their personal experiences or collective alliances with the human and the beyond human. The artists claim the conditions of belonging somewhere and the rights to not being dispossessed. Just as they consider the danger of biologically constructed identities and the pressures placed on groups who choose not to adapt to hyper-modernization.

With respect for their diverse points of view, what these artists are seen to have in common is the act of thinking about a terrestrial level of existence. These often very subtle gestures, actions, and imaginaries offer a manifestation of a land ethic that is tangible, relational, and, on some level, universal. If politics starts with identifying a territory, the invited artists encourage us to think about new ways of defining shared spaces.

Concept: Aleksandra Jach und Melanie Roumiguière.

Image: Carolina Caycedo, Rio de todos, rio de nadie, 2017, Perfomance at the Main Museum, Los Angeles (Priscilla Mars)