Los Memorias del Río Aguas. Interweaving Performance Art with local Water Cultures.

A play about the struggles around legitimacy to act, about positionalities in territories marked by power dynamics in which us, as performers, as activists, as people, cannot be neutral, cannot not take a stance, acting is a stance equally to not acting, staying is a stance, leaving another one. What do you do when you learn that the intentional community, your eco-project, the home you identify with is based on colonial theft, has been stolen from people who had lived here throughout all their lives? What do you do when you know that reparation processes take a long time while you are here to stay for a couple months, enjoy, laugh, cry, learn a lot and leave, such as everyone else in that same project? What do you do when the people you consider as colonizers of the area consider you as the colonizers of this village? What do you do when you get invited to a project for a period of 10 days to perform the struggle of the land without knowing it, to people who might know better than you? What do you do when you can’t enact the theory of change that you have cristal clear in your head as direct action? What do you do when you have to agree with 12 others about what to do and how to represent something that you all have different positions about? How do you present an unfinished line of thoughts, feelings, emotions, actitudes? How can we find purpose in what we do? The performance, invites to a hike through Los Molinos, engages the audience on a journey to look for a drop of water flowing up. Defying gravity. Doing the impossible. Rebelling. Defending itself. Getting sucked up. Pumping itself up thrugh its own force like the water in Los Molinos from Río Aguas to the houses of its residents pushes itself through the ram pump. On their journey they find a group of self-proclaimed activists who are there to defend the river, in search for a direct action, in search for purpose and there to do something against the ecocide. This group quickly looses themselves in the experience of drought, a journey inwards begins in which the activists are getting existential about experiencing the effects of privatized, accumulated and power-directed water flows of which most people are exempted. It is hard to stay at the margins, in which these effects are sensible first. Next to Spain and France exhausting themselves in games of green growth and police violence supervised by the EU, there are strange bird creatures eating the guts of a colonizer dude from the UK who came to Sunseed to plant prosopis and thereby save the region from desertification. The birds chant cryptical ancestral territorial knowledges and predict the future to be red through capital driven human interventions. When the birds turn slowly on the audience to read some more guts (?), the poet leads them to the maze in which they re-encounter the activist group which has still not lost their zest for action. The group enters the maze and transforms into a stream of consciousness, moving back and forth, battling for reason, legitimacy and purpose. Wondering what kinds of actions, if any, make sense. No common conclusion is reached. The activists shed tears, laying them carefully into the middle of the maze. The poet ends on: The only thing we can do is share our water even though our only water might be the tears that we shed for the bodies of water we lost in the fight.