Lina Bravo Mora (Bogotá) Based in Amsterdam, is a visual artist, clay and soil researcher with a background in social anthropology, radical pedagogies and facilitation for conflict transformation. In her research she investigates poetic visions and sensations on the geologies of touch, and our not-so-innocent embodied entanglements with the territories we inhabit, dream of, and/or are part of. She works in co-creating educational spaces and programs for life-sustaining, emancipatory and liberatory practices.
Desentierros/Unearthings: stories of clays, deep waters, migrations and unwanted findings, Amsterdam, 2023
Installation, lecture – performance, somatic activation
Earthenware and stoneware, glass, pine wood, sludge from Amsterdam canals found in NDSM, clay from NederrIjn, Waal and Maas rivers.
Over time, Amsterdam’s waterlogged territory has served as a site of convergence for multiple migrations: human and more-than-human. Clay, sand, and lime sediments that traveled from the inland through river flows have accumulated in its canals, preserving memories of water systems and landscapes. Significant amounts of heavy metals, including mercury and lead, can be detected in these sediments, revealing one footprint of careless industrial waste management in these territories. To expand dryland areas, part of these sediments has been used as landfilling material. Some time ago, while searching for local clays, I gathered some of them in Amsterdam Noord. This polluted sediment unearthing has grown into a somatic, bowel-uncovering research on toxicity and filth.
This installation and guided somatic activation are invitations to take the carefully hidden reality of heavy metal polluted soil and water and put it over the table. To sit with our complex entanglements with them and sense the effects of toxicity unleashed by global capitalist necropolitics in our intricate living systems. Following generative somatic and embodied social justice lineages, I propose tracking the sensations they provoke in our bodies as a possible start toward different forms of resistance, activation, and remediation. Ancient deities of filth and medicinal plants are invited to care for us during this uneasy quest.