For the first time, the bilingual edition of OÍR SOMOS RÍO / Flussrauschen Flusslauschen initiated and edited by Magdalena Walpoth & Elkin Claderón is presented. At this occasion, Sina Ribak accompanies the collective reading enfolding within ‘a book is a room where we can meet‘ created by Jana Maria Dohmann & Nadine Vollmer | Kulturen des Kuratorischen. Illustration by Ana Delgado.
In this two-sided book we are following the journeys of two women navigating the San Juan river, meandering through the Chocó, a marginalized region in Colombia. The narration by Godula Buchholz, German art and bookseller, of her rather unusual downstream travel in 1959 is based on photographs and her memories . Almost 60 years later, the author and activist Velia Vidal from Chocó, shares her account of her recent upstream travel experience completing the tale of her homeland from a socially critical and ecofeminist perspective.
This is exactly my world, the loneliness of the rainforest, the heavy rain turning into a thunderstorm that suddenly stops, pattering again after a couple of hours, the Pacific, which actually still should be called the Sea of the South, as it formerly was the usage in Spanish (in Embera it is still called phusa), the Caribbean, which stretches the entire length of the Dariéns and an endless list of rivers, which at the end seem to be united by three great rivers: the Atrato, the Baudó and the San Juan. The Chocó is my world.
Velia Vidal
OÌR SOMOS RÌO Book Presentation & Reading Session
with Magdalena Walpoth (Grindwal Kollektiv) & Elkin Calderón, and Sina Ribak
Wednesday, 25th of August 2021, SPOILER, Quitzowstraße 108a, 10551 Berlin