Meandering
Design: Lana Jerichová
TBA21–Academy
Research
Programming
EN / ES
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, our artistic research program, Meandering, unfolds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the life-affirming wisdom of water. Through sharing experience and experimentation, and by developing critical-creative insight about the interplays between river, land, ocean, and atmosphere, the program anchors TBA21–Academy’s practices and methodologies for “thinking oceanically about more-than-ocean.”
In a journey that is both the practice and the destination, Meandering is based on live research—an experiential and experimental approach to how artistic research can generate renewed sensibilities for social and environmental justice. As a means of wayfinding and sense-making, it seeks to formulate a practical and poetic toolset for understanding our interdependence with the watershed, continuing TBA21’s commitment towards more regenerative life-relations with our ecologically and socially unjust pasts, our complicit presents, and our complex futures.
As a sibling to the curatorial fellowship program The Current, in its multi-year commitment to Ocean research, Meandering shapes and embodies a language of movement—one that strengthens local imaginaries through close attention to its flowing within situated contexts. Structured by three-year cycles, the program contributes to contemporary debates on justice in river governance and the transformation of freshwater ecosystems, through both new and ancestral cultural, ecological, and spiritual practices and discourses.
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, our artistic research program, Meandering, unfolds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the life-affirming wisdom of water. Through sharing experience and experimentation, and by developing critical-creative insight about the interplays between river, land, ocean, and atmosphere, the program anchors TBA21–Academy’s practices and methodologies for “thinking oceanically about more-than-ocean.”
In a journey that is both the practice and the destination, Meandering is based on live research—an experiential and experimental approach to how artistic research can generate renewed sensibilities for social and environmental justice. As a means of wayfinding and sense-making, it seeks to formulate a practical and poetic toolset for understanding our interdependence with the watershed, continuing TBA21’s commitment towards more regenerative life-relations with our ecologically and socially unjust pasts, our complicit presents, and our complex futures.
As a sibling to the curatorial fellowship program The Current, in its multi-year commitment to Ocean research, Meandering shapes and embodies a language of movement—one that strengthens local imaginaries through close attention to its flowing within situated contexts. Structured by three-year cycles, the program contributes to contemporary debates on justice in river governance and the transformation of freshwater ecosystems, through both new and ancestral cultural, ecological, and spiritual practices and discourses.
Guadalquivir
Meandering’s course through the Guadalquivir (2022-2024) traces river systems through the sierras and forests in the south of Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean in a complex cartography of cultural, ecological, and spiritual exchange. For this cycle, three research commissions, from pop polymath Lafawndah (b.1984, France); philosophy-trained choreographer Isabel Lewis (b. 1981, Dominican Republic); and visionary artist Eduardo Navarro (b. 1979, Argentina) with documentation by photographer Lourdes Cabrera (b. 1979, Spain), complement an in-depth public program of in-person and online convenings, performances, publishing, and study.