Aguas arriba, aguas abajo – Upstream, downstream along the river
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('MMM') }}
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('YYYY') }}
| Admission: Free Admission |
| Which languages: English, German, Spanish |
| Venue: Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Belongs to: Agua. The Art and Cosmologies of Water, Opening Mine. Yours. Ours!? |
Leonel Vásquez coaxes sound from river stones, while Alejandro Salcedo paints with earth. Both work in the Páramo de Sumapaz, where water begins as mist. Joined by curator Juliana Steiner Fraser, they speak about the Escuela del Agua (Water School) and a way of knowing in which the visible is sustained by the invisible.
Nhé’ẽ sind zirkuläre Gespräche, die zum Austausch von Wissen, Erfahrungen und Perspektiven einladen. Der Begriff stammt aus der Sprache der Guarani und bezeichnet unter anderem das Wort, die Stimme und die Sprache, aber auch den Geist.
Participants
Leonel Vásquez (Bogotá, 1981) is a Colombian sound artist. He creates listening devices, spaces, and experiences as political, aesthetic, somatic, and regenerative acts. His work explores more-than-human sonic agencies, including water, trees, rocks, whales, and milk. His interests include recognizing nature as a victim of Colombia’s armed conflict and promoting the symbolic restoration of rivers and forests. He fosters relational listening practices and affective communities to create acoustic agreements. His research focuses on cosmo-resonances, singing in interspecies care, and acoustic-poetic restoration. He leads the cultural biocentre Estación de Escucha de Alta Montaña in the Sumapaz páramo, a place dedicated to dialoguing with living beings and paying tribute to water.
Alejandro Salcedo is an artist and researcher from Bogotá. He works primarily with painting, film and collaborative art. He explores forms of collective work in partnership with human and more than human beings centred on the idea of paradise; in these interactions, notions of justice, balance and symbiosis seek to create a microcosm of society, where we are all learners and teachers. A graduate of the National University of Colombia, with an MAFA and an MRes from Chelsea College of Art and Design, in 2023 he took part in the XII. Luis Caballero Prize with his project Minuta. Since 2019, he has been developing the film Veintes, an archive of performances and situations recorded on Super 8 to compose a work of fiction that reflects the delirium of this decade.
Juliana Steiner Fraser is an independent curator and researcher based in Bogotá. Her practice engages contemporary art, pedagogy, architecture, and political ecology.
She is Associate Curator of the Bogotá Biennial, opening September 2027. Recent projects include Leonel Vásquez’s first New York solo exhibition at 601 Artspace (2026) and Ecotono: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones, developed for Common Ground at Bard College (2022–23), which culminated in the publication Ecotone: Silent Revolutions (Bard College Press, 2025), a finalist in the XIV Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2026).