top of page
Search

🌊 Urban River Swimmer at the Venice Biennale 2024

Updated: 1 day ago



🌊 What if we entered the Venice Biennale?


As "foreigners" at the 2024 Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere, we stepped into the space with our intervention Urban River Bather. The performance itself is also a foreigner. This is the first Biennale curated by someone from the Global South, the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who brought a strong decolonial perspective, amplifying voices and strengthening global struggles.


Wearing “swimwear” like a sanitation jumpsuit and snorkel mask, our "futurist bather" entered the Biennale, carrying the historical scars of colonialism and extractivism that have turned Latin American rivers, such as the Tietê, into sites of industrial exploitation. Inspired by real immersions in São Paulo’s polluted rivers, this intervention exposes the climate urgency that inevitably connects us all.


Our intervention engaged in dialogue with Aguacero by Daniel Otero Torres (@danieloterotorres), a piece addressing the Emberá people’s fight for clean water along Colombia’s Atrato River. Together, these narratives denounce the financialization of nature and the environmental crisis. Just as Aguacero captures rainwater in a stilt structure, Urban River Bather envisions a “dystopian” future, questioning the normalization of rivers as dumping grounds for waste.


🌍 From São Paulo to Venice—what’s the connection?

This link between the murky waters of exploited countries and the vulnerability of a European historic center, threatened by rising sea levels, reveals the universal impact of climate change and the enduring weight of coloniality on these relationships.


The bather is a body displaced in time, carrying the scars of rivers turned into zones of exploitation while projecting us into a shared climate-urgent future.


📍 And we’re also at “Where There’s Smoke” at the Ipiranga Museum @museudoipiranga


📹 @jacopo_pergameno & @flaviobarollo


Comments

bottom of page