Cine+Perfo

SYNOPSIS

In Moving a River, made during a residency at ISLA (Saco Biennial) in May 2023, we find another type of embodied transfer, which takes the Chillón River to the Atacama Desert. The performance begins on the coast of Chile, at Playa Mejillones. After wearing orange overalls, vinyl work gloves, boots, a helmet and noise-canceling construction headphones, Urbina stuffs sand into an industrial storage bag. Climbing steep mountains near the edge of the coast toward an arid plateau, Urbina walks toward a pampa, carrying the sandbag, pickaxe, shovel, and wearing bottles around his neck like an ancient pre-Hispanic necklace. However, these necklaces are not filled with seawater as it appears in the first shots, but with the artist’s urine (in fact, it is less deadly if ingested than seawater).

Traversing the driest desert in the world, Urbina sustains himself through his own bodily fluids, while using engineering instruments to draw lines on the stony ground, emulating the Nazca Lines or geoglyphs of the desert in his aerial visual conception of the design, filling them with sand carried from the beach to delineate the current borders of Peru-Chile-Bolivia, the same countries that disputed this resource-rich territory during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884). As he continues to work in this unforgiving environment, consuming more urine from exhaustion, his bladder bursts.

The dialogues, crossings, areas of mourning and marks that Urbina proposes from the ”symbologies of fear”, the staging of the precarious condition of the most devastated bodies in the geopolitics of identity take us as a flow, channel, of an imagined river to transfer, to “transmigrate” common memories of border landmarks to challenge and redesign their crude marks.