La Nueva Fábrica is pleased to announce La fluidez de los cuerpos [The Fluidity of Bodies], an educational project developed in alliance with La Escuela.

The project will unfold through a series of workshops with the students of the Instituto Municipal de Educación Básica Aldea Santa Ana in Antigua, Guatemala and it will culminate in a public event that will begin on Friday, May 31 at 1:00 p.m. on the Plaza Central of Santa Ana, Antigua Guatemala.

For this project, invited artist Seba Calfuqueo in collaboration with Sophia Arrazola (artist and Impact Coordinator at La Nueva Fábrica) proposes a space of knowledge exchange to recognize the fluidity of our bodies and ways of relating to water not centered on its extraction but rather on its ability to make communities thrive. 

As living beings, we are facing a crisis due to water scarcity. Through this project, we seek to initiate a dialogue around our relationship with water individually as bodies, collectively as societies, and epistemically.  

In light of the direct impact that water issues have on La Nueva Fábrica’s local communities, we focused our work on young students. We have created a playful methodology that responds to the needs and expectations of the local community of young people (13 – 15 years old) who will be invited to be the protagonists of a process of knowledge exchange.

Through the project we will address fundamental questions such as:

Is fluidity a natural characteristic of our bodies?

What are other ways of relating to water that are not based on extraction but rather on acknowledgment?

Is water an element around which identity is built? Does it have rights? 

Does water connect bodies and beings?

The resulting educational space will consist of three fundamental elements:

– Connection: recognition of the shared fluidity of our bodies on an individual and collective level

– Exchange: knowledge geared toward a social understanding of water cycles—past, present, and future

– Resignification: co-creation of new relational imaginaries with water and with each other

The project consists of a visualization of cycles in which we revisit the past to understand our relationship with water as an identity, social, political, epistemological, and spiritual element around which community life develops, starting from our bodily experience. We will then seek to recognize the problems in the present and propose indicators of change in the future, imagining new scenarios in which water is not understood only as a resource in an economic framework, but as one of the actors of our community, a living archive of relationships and knowledge.

Through different narrative practices we will create an exercise of communal poetry to shape new imaginaries and establish other ways of relating to water through the recognition of the fluidity of our bodies.

Seba Calfuqueo (Santiago, Chile, 1991) Visual artist and teacher. Bachelor and Master in Visual Arts from the University of Chile. She is part of the collective Rangiñtulewfü and Yene magazine. Of Mapuche origin, her work resorts to her cultural heritage as a starting point to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural and political status of the Mapuche subject within the current Chilean society. Her work includes installation, ceramics, performance and video, with the aim of exploring both the cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes that occur at the crossroads between indigenous and westernized ways of thinking, and also to make visible the issues surrounding feminism and sexual dissidence. Her work has been exhibited in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, United States, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia. She received the Santiago Municipality Award (2017) and the FAVA Foundation Award (2018).

Image: TRAY TRAY KO 5Seba Calfuqueo. Registro Sebastián Melo.