In the proximities of the Spree River in Berlin, Germany, we invited scholars, passersby, and water enthusiasts to symbolically cross the ocean and arrive to the Magdalena River in Colombia.

During the days of the Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival, different bodies, languages, and perspectives came together in a performative interview disorienting riverscape imaginaries. The result is a collection of images and sounds as sediments of their speculative and fluid responses.

This exercise took place between the autumn and the winter of 2025, at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, TA T (Tieranatomisches Theater).

Behind this experimentation:
IRI THESys [Laura Betancur Alarcón, Pauline Münch, Matthias Zarama Giedion]
abraso [ Camilo Londoño Hernández , Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya ] in collaboration with Ricardo Tovar Mateus
Berlin-based artists and writers [Joshua Meissner, Klemens Czurda]

Supported by Humboldt Universität Berlin and Ministry of Culture Colombia

After a recent historical discovery where scientists documented the existence of gravitational waves that modify contemporary notions of space-time, abraso, the Mobile Center for Intratropical Artistic Research and Affective Practices, decided to imagine a present in which time, distorted by the affectations of those gravitational waves, accelerates immeasurably. 

Based on empirical, emotional, and experimental methodologies, we want to carry out a study to measure and resist, physically and affectively, this hurried time. For this purpose, Abraso's artists have invented the project “Interferometer: measurements and mediations of a slower space-time”, a place to think and activate delaying strategies counteracting the present speed in which we inhabit. Intertwining reality, history, and science fiction, this proposal displays a collective learning device to invite different audiences to imagine ways of inhabiting our present, thus speculating leisurely on possible futures.

Through fictional exercises and critical reflections, this artwork presents a stage to confront the hegemonic notion of time, and its implications in an era determined by the exploitation of resources, consumption, and overproduction. In our current technocentric and hypercapitalist world, Abraso proposes a meeting space of slowness and laziness to relieve an existential eagerness that has been hastily consuming the space of our time.

This project was a performative interview where 11 people were asked to try to explain with their bodies what they understand, don’t know, imagine and feel about the equinox. 

Taking advantage of the astronomical phenomenon that marks the transition from summer to autumn in the northern hemisphere, on September 23rd, 2023, a temporary observatory was installed in the Der Laden Gallery (Weimar, Germany) to study the affective understanding of this seasonal transit. There, a precarious observation area was (re)created where the artists, in the role of researchers, engaged in a dialogue with the participants of the experiment to digress around the understanding of the sun at this time of the year. In this dialogue, they reflected on themes and concepts such as language, translation, migration, and nostalgia as affective effects of the movement and intensity of the sun.

La altura indefinida ( Indefinite height ) is an audiovisual installation that reflects on the disappearance of tropical glaciers through a thermal-affective exploration of the Puracé volcano, once covered in perpetual snow. 
This sensitive exercise articulates sound, image, and word through a multi-channel film montage that reflects on the paradoxical relationship between finitude and its immeasurable confrontation.
Revisiting historical events related to the natural sciences and reinterpreting the qualities of matter, La altura indefinida delves into textures and frequencies that attempt to temporarily reconfigure spatial notions of territory, physically and emotionally describing tensions between nineteenth-century imaginaries and their current transformation.

The will to live is the drive behind Camilo’s migration from Colombia to Germany living with hiv. After feeling loneliness and disorientation due to facing bureaucratic discrimination against his body and sexuality, the director and protagonist embrace friendship, nostalgia, and the beauty of everyday life to create a home for himself. In Spanglish dialogues, from a poetic, autobiographical, and collective perspective, this documentary creates an intimate and performative scenario where all life forces float in the same water.

“The Swimmer” explores alternative narratives and amplifies marginalized voices through a hybrid of cinematic and artistic storytelling. It addresses identity, migration, and belonging, fostering intercultural dialogue and emotional resonance. Transitioning into the cinematic industry and after being developed for the exhibition “Lost in Translation” for the Bauhaus Museum, the project has gained international recognition, selected for #LINK at FIDBA - International Film Festival of Buenos Aires, where it won a sound post-production award supported by Yagán Films and received the FDC fund, an automatic Colombian grant. Collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Colombia further bolsters its reach. As a project in advanced development has participated in industry spaces like ENOURAGE Talents Berlin 2025 and awaits completion by 2025/2026.

Coincidentally, two friends took the same photo without saying to each other during a trip to Bolivia. Once they realize this, they decide to reorder their memories of the South America landscape. In a constant question of the value of photography, film, and montage as memory devices, this experimental documentary narrates the experiences of crossing the Andes to interrogate the body and its relationship with the ditches of Latin American territory. Their intimate dialogue of this journey becomes a poetic, sound, and visual essay that unfolds, from the present, memories, feelings, and ideas about time, politics, and intimacy.

The central axis of the installation consists of a geodesic sight modified with electronic components to be used as a light projector. Rotating 360 degrees at a speed close to one earth revolution, the projected light simulates the presence of a sun moving over the structure of space. This apparatus, which was previously used to measure the world, is intervened with the intention of allowing the viewer to experience the tangible alteration of the perception of space-time through the presence of a body of light that distorts in relation to the irregularities of the place, increasing or decreasing its size and speed, apparently, according to the distances between its luminous integrity and the emitting center.

Once a day, the artist places himself in the space, and during the time it takes for the light to cross his face, a verbal act takes place that mobilizes the poetic interpretation of the installation through the amplification of a recital that reflects on the impossibility of seeing the sun directly. Linking empirical references on the equinoctial experience of the world through a fictional text to the sun, the artist exposes himself to the projected light for 18 minutes, reproducing through a speaker mask the text of his authorship and simulating the interpretation of the song "Tonada de luna llena" by Simón Díaz, sung by Caetano Veloso. During the action, an audiovisual projection accompanies the event with a live image of the artist's side profile. The projected image, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, shows the performer lying down, looking at the sky, while the text intermingled with the image follows the reading in a visual feedback produced by the reproduction of the image within itself.

Or the other way around is a transmedial project that articulates word, action, and audiovisual image in a performative installation. Temporally locating the current state of an affective research on the perception of space-time in relation to the experience of the sun, this project addresses the physical and emotional contrasts that have been suggested to the artist by undergoing a transatlantic distancing. Between empirical approaches that strain the historical relations between the northern hemisphere and the tropical Latin American region, Juan Pablo questions the hemispheric and western conditions that have colonized the perception of the world, provoking a verbal event that suggests the possibility of configuring affective and corporeal constellations through reflection detonated by paradoxical mechanisms.