Intersecting Mediterraneans is a long-term collaborative project by Daniela Medina Poch and Elizabeth Gallón Droste, which elaborates on the pluralisation and complication of geographical imagination of singular Mediterranean, through the orchestration of encounters with Mediterranean regional rivers. The project follows the flowing of calm, furious or disappearing/ed waters, able to carry the sea uphill and inland, while moving across longings and exhaustions of the Mediterranean(s). At the core lies storytelling in many voices, tones and languages, which casts an intimate light on individual and collective stories of entanglement and tough-to-break nodes, while giving sonic body to histories of reciprocal oblivion, irreducible divide between localities –physical and fabricated– and experiences –lived and desired.

 

This new digital configuration of the Intersecting Mediterraneans project, Intersecting Mediterraneans: A Sonic Submergence, invites visitors to dive into an apparently chaotic sonic landscape, which weaves together fragments of shattered cumulative repertoires of memories, affects and knowledges, of both waters and lands.  Each of the rivers appears here as a lone thread, to be pulled out from a fabric that is never fully graspable. 

 

Some rivers are being voiced by relational biographies, others are present only at the intersections, in the moments of silence. Some rivers are rivers no more, but resist solely as underwater ripples, emerging momentarily, through distant yet persistent echoes. Some of the rivers, which run somewhere between mountains and seas, are spoken by unheard voices. All participate in Mediterraneans that swallow as many possibilities and doubts as are the voices uttering their tales.

 

Participating in this project are the voices, stories and gazes of:

 

Boushra Adi

Martha Ardila

Shiran Berkobich

Zahra Berramdane زهرة بنرمضان

Abla Eloudghiri

Lucía Gallón

Juditt Gatt

Miriam Gatt

Francisca Hartmann

Lea Mijaçika

Dina Mimi

Francesca Ongaro

Ivana Papic

Lara Tabet

Kaliroi Tsolakidou

Blanca Utrillas

 

 

Navigation instruction:

 

Hover over the images, text and rivers’ names to reveal the buttons that activate soundscapes and storytelling recordings, click on them to start listening.

 

 

Artists bios

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  Daniela Medina Poch is a visual artist and researcher working between Bogotá and Berlin. Through an intersectional lens, her work aims to contribute to the conception of socio-ecological narratives that outlive canonical categories and asymmetrical power relations. Investigating specificities of diverse contexts, her practice is often developed through performative installations, expanded listening spaces, collective platforms and the formulation of discursive language. Daniela’s work has been part of LOOP festival Barcelona 2015; Artecámara ARTBO Bogotá 2018; FLORA ars+natura Bogotá 2018; Transmediale Berlín 2020; The Listening Biennale Berlin 2021; SAVVY Contemporary 2020 and 2021; Museo de Arte Moderno Bogotá 2022. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and the digital collections of the Museo de la Memoria Histórica de Bogotá and Collecteurs the Museum of Private Collections. Daniela is co-initiator of the curatorial program Babel Media Art and the collective Co-Re (contextual research) and she is currently attending the MA program Art in Context at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where she is developing performative investigations around ecoaffectivities and aqualiteracies. 

 

 

  Elizabeth Gallón Droste is a multimodal researcher and visual artist. In her work she focuses on entanglements and becomings in more-than-human landscapes, focusing on site specific relational ontologies, in interdisciplinary dialogue between writing, video, photography and sound. Since 2014 she has been part of diverse platforms (Sinfonía Trópico, Filmouflage, Klima-Krise-Klitoris), working on the awareness of biodiversity loss and its consequences through dialogues between arts and science, local collective processes and audio-visual encounters. Currently she is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the International Graduate School 'Temporalities of Future' at the Free University in Berlin, where she navigates the process of representing rivers rights, within the framework of the recognition of the Atrato River in Chocó-Colombia as a subject of rights in 2016.

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Intersecting Mediterraneans: A Sonic Submergence was commissioned by EX NUNC in the context of EXN Lagoon, curated by Chiara Cartuccia.

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