Available at: http://climacom.mudancasclimaticas.net.br/rios-forca-fluxo/

The artwork is a photo book that creates a river-space with the flow of trace-memories gathered from my and Fernanda Oliveira personal dataset experiences, by which we were flooded by river images across different countries over more than 10 years of photos.

Theoretical Framework

Thinking about rivers means a gesture to us. A gesture that invites us to consider the intentionality of their movements and the traces they leave behind. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls a certain characteristic of the Anthropocene "slow disturbance." For her, "our age is a time of contaminated emergencies, landscapes that arise with the residual trace of environmental destruction, imperial conquest, profit-seeking, racism, and authoritarian norms—as well as creative becoming" (TSING, 2019, p. 23). The American anthropologist refers to landscapes that foster unusual collaborations within a contaminated landscape—specifically, certain anthropogenic ecosystems in which diverse species coexist. This line of thought informs this work. The aim is not to claim a landscape or refute a space, but to reveal a river-existence—to imagine a possible "slow disturbance" through the traces of our experiences, as seen in images from our personal databases. For us, imagining this "slow disturbance" meant building a geographical-poetic river-space by combining our individual confrontations. Memories are activated by the gaze, which brings the work to life as we follow the flow of this crossing.

Artistic Process

The path follows the possibilities of contaminated encounters guided by the wordplay of force-flow. The notion of a trace is essential to this work, but here, the logic is inverted. Instead of waiting for the flood to pass to gather its traces, we constructed the river-space directly from the traces—from the disturbance itself. We chose images based on what they called to us and combined them with their official geographical coordinates, which were arranged through a combination of three words.

This creates a geolocated poetry in a space that doesn't exist, one that flirts with the physical but is only a possibility. The geographical form of this work was made possible by the app ///What3words, a geolocalization system with a resolution of three square meters. Every location on the globe is represented by three permanent words. However, ///rios.força.fluxo does not correspond to any physical location—a pleasant coincidence.