BARRANQUILLA.- OtherNetwork presents Bocas de agua, the sixth edition of its experimental curatorial project, guest curated by Guatemalan independent arts initiative La Nueva Fábrica and hosted by Casa de Meira at the Galería de Bellas Artes in Barranquilla.

Approaching Barranquilla as a watery ecosystem shaped by the meeting of the Magdalena River and the Caribbean Sea, curator Ilaria Conti asks: what changes when water is no longer approached as landscape, resource or metaphor, but as a neighbour? Grounded in hydrofeminist thought, the exhibition understands bodies as porous and relational – bodies of water constituted through exchanges that precede and exceed the individual. Yet shared water is politically charged, and does not imply equal conditions. Water is situated within territories, histories, infrastructures and asymmetrical relations of extraction, care, dispossession and survival.

Bocas de agua proposes thinking with water rather than speaking for it, bringing together newly commissioned and existing works by artists across Colombia, Guatemala and the wider region. Artworks concerned with the social and epistemic struggles that emerge around access to and care for water come from ASOPLAYA & Luis González Vergara, Marilyn Boror Bor, Carolina Caycedo, Seba Calfuqueo, Cheen & Manuel Chavajay, davi de jesus do nascimento, Regina José Galindo, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Nadia Huggins, María Leguízamo, Breidy Manes Robledo, Nomasmetaforas and Christian Salablanca Díaz. Here, water can be understood as an ancestor, an archive, an image-making agent, and as a carrier of knowledge.





The exhibition contributes to OtherNetwork’s ongoing mission of fostering transnational collaboration between independent art spaces, following iterations in Stuttgart, Accra, Johannesburg, Salvador and San Juan that each challenged the conventions of a travelling exhibition. As part of this experimental approach, Bocas de agua runs in parallel to an expansive global programme bringing together new and existing partners spread across Akosombo, Barranquilla, São Paulo, Santiago and Valdivia, each invited to think through themes of hydrofeminism.

Bocas de Agua is a coproduction between OtherNetwork and ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.