The Current IV: Caribbean
Convening #1 “...telling of oceanic transformations”
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
December 8 –
December 9, 2023
Design: Pardo
Past
TBA21–Academy
Research
EN/ES
CONVENING #1
A two-day multidisciplinary festival curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, Curatorial Fellow of The Current IV: Caribbean: "otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua" [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves].
On the coasts, living beings test the aesthetic tools and strategies [1] that allow them to return to the ocean. Until a few centuries ago, these trials mainly took place on the slopes of volcanos. Then they started to appear on mountain tops and, in recent decades, they have also started to crop up on the coasts, many of them made up of caliche or ancient coral reefs, always in relief and given a certain resonance by the wind.
Convening #1: "…para contar transformaciones oceánicas" [telling of oceanic transformations] is a two-day festival conceived as an ambitious trial made up of several parts, each of which is intended to give continuity—through bodily exercises—to the tools and strategies that contribute to our reconciliation with the ocean’s constant movement.
The festival’s point of departure is the evolution of the marine channel which, until less than a million years ago, existed between the current Neiba Bay in the Dominican Republic and Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and the bodies of water it left behind—Rincón Lagoon, Lake Enriquillo, and Lake Azuéi. It will then go on to examine, through conversations, workshops, screenings and contemporary dance, the evolution of the ocean in this part of the Caribbean tectonic plate, and how certain conditions, perfect for the emergence of very particular living beings, came to arise. This area also includes mountain systems that were key spaces on the island of Ayiti/Quisqueya (Hispaniola), allowing us to trial of some of the aesthetic tools and strategies that accompanied us during the first year of our work on The Current IV (escapism, flotation, improvisation) and, at the same time, introducing others that will accompany us over the coming year (oneiric states, transmutation and repetition).
The trials proposed by Convening #1 take inspiration from certain living beings, whose bodily forms and sensory and perceptive systems embody the oceanic transformations that they have experienced over thousands of years, namely corals and Coccothrinax. The latter are a family of palms which, to date, are endemic to the Caribbean tectonic plate. The purpose is to investigate how, from our human bodily nature and sensory and perceptive capacity, we can establish relationships with oceanic-geological transformations of a scale that utterly dwarfs us.
Today we are on the coast, and soon we will be on the other mountains, adrift beneath the waves.
— Yina Jiménez Suriel
CONVENING #1
A two-day multidisciplinary festival curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, Curatorial Fellow of The Current IV: Caribbean: "otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua" [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves].
On the coasts, living beings test the aesthetic tools and strategies [1] that allow them to return to the ocean. Until a few centuries ago, these trials mainly took place on the slopes of volcanos. Then they started to appear on mountain tops and, in recent decades, they have also started to crop up on the coasts, many of them made up of caliche or ancient coral reefs, always in relief and given a certain resonance by the wind.
Convening #1: "…para contar transformaciones oceánicas" [telling of oceanic transformations] is a two-day festival conceived as an ambitious trial made up of several parts, each of which is intended to give continuity—through bodily exercises—to the tools and strategies that contribute to our reconciliation with the ocean’s constant movement.
The festival’s point of departure is the evolution of the marine channel which, until less than a million years ago, existed between the current Neiba Bay in the Dominican Republic and Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and the bodies of water it left behind—Rincón Lagoon, Lake Enriquillo, and Lake Azuéi. It will then go on to examine, through conversations, workshops, screenings and contemporary dance, the evolution of the ocean in this part of the Caribbean tectonic plate, and how certain conditions, perfect for the emergence of very particular living beings, came to arise. This area also includes mountain systems that were key spaces on the island of Ayiti/Quisqueya (Hispaniola), allowing us to trial of some of the aesthetic tools and strategies that accompanied us during the first year of our work on The Current IV (escapism, flotation, improvisation) and, at the same time, introducing others that will accompany us over the coming year (oneiric states, transmutation and repetition).
The trials proposed by Convening #1 take inspiration from certain living beings, whose bodily forms and sensory and perceptive systems embody the oceanic transformations that they have experienced over thousands of years, namely corals and Coccothrinax. The latter are a family of palms which, to date, are endemic to the Caribbean tectonic plate. The purpose is to investigate how, from our human bodily nature and sensory and perceptive capacity, we can establish relationships with oceanic-geological transformations of a scale that utterly dwarfs us.
Today we are on the coast, and soon we will be on the other mountains, adrift beneath the waves.
— Yina Jiménez Suriel
[1] This concept was developed through the La historia de las montañas [The History of Mountains] research project, and refers to different forms of sensory knowledge created by living beings of the human species in relation to other living beings in different parts of the world and at different times, which allow us to touch desire and thus access that which the psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik calls our vital force. Here we make a distinction between aesthetic strategies and tools, the former being intangible technologies that enable tools to operate as such.