Welcome to Confluences, a column on art, kinship and life.

“Species are not binary,” writes Indigenous Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo in Issue #12, “We move through waters that adapt to different containers of our experiences and corporeality.” I’m reminded of these words as I speak with Sofía Lemos, the curator behind TBA21-Academy’s Meandering, a three-year multi-platform research programme exploring “how contemplative practices and poetics of the imagination can renew cultural approaches to social and environmental justice”. In contemplating our current theme of cosmology, I’ve been thinking not only about what constellations of thought and belief comprise cosmologies - both personal and communal - but also about how we navigate and inhabit them. As Calfuqueo notes, we are not binary creatures - and neither must be the way we move through and interpret the world. It’s this sense of expansive creativity that Lemos evokes when telling me about Meandering.

Originally focused on a critical and artistic exploration of oceans, the project has recently branched out to encompass rivers as well - starting with the Guadalquivir river, which runs through Andalusia, Spain. Meandering comprises three selected artists, each working in a three-year cycle to engage with the river (and the city of Córdoba as a riverside community) in their work. The current cycle is made up of: Berlin-based choreographer and artist Isabel Lewis, Iranian-Egyptian musician Lafawndah and Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro. The river, as Lemos puts it beautifully, is a richly illustrative figure - an intermediary plane, an artery - and, like the undulating curvature of a river, Meandering is experiential and process-based; the trajectory is the practice itself. The ultimate idea, Lemos tells me, is to build a set of discursive practices or poetics of the imagination to aid in arriving “at a more just, environmentally sound world… creating the conditions of possibility for social transformation.”

Lemos opts to use the term “extra-disciplinary” to describe the practices of the participating artists - as in, not only melding and working across various disciplines but moreover shifting the traditional paradigm of binaries and boundaries between disciplines. So, too, is the binary dissolved between process and output. The programme is based on “live research: a new approach to how artistic practice can offer renewed sensibilities for social and environmental justice through scholarly, sensorial, and spiritual approaches that mobilise experience and curiosity with engaged and contemplative propositions, performative vocabularies, and experimental pedagogies.” Here, once again, I am reminded of Calfuqueo’s work and words: “I have tried to think of my work as a space where questions are opened… that complement each other with the view of the audience and art as a pedagogical tool.”

The Meandering artists will be engaging the public in their practices in An Ocean Without Shore (Un Océano Sin Orilla), a free three-day convening of music, performances and more. The programme, as its press release states, “moves through intergenerational conversations, stories, and exchanges between artists, activists, poets, practitioners, and thinkers that explore diverse riverine ways of being and belonging.” It’s here that we return to our theme of cosmology - and how it is navigated. With Meandering, the participating artists are part of a three-pronged initiative spanning contemporary art, social justice and environmental justice: interconnected facets of a shared world in which dialogue between them becomes about communion rather than about separation. Artists, Lemos muses, are cosmologists: deepening our awareness of the ways in which we inhabit reality, offering us “metaphysical propositions that allow us to revisit, to rebuild.”