Rivers and Other Mother Tongues is a new site-responsive iteration of ZEMI. A participatory textile instrument inspired by the concept that the Taíno people of the Caribbean have of their ancestral spirit zemi as a vessel for memory, story, and ancestral knowledge. Visitors engage an evolving sonic landscape by moving across the carpet, encountering stories shaped by journeys across rivers, oceans, and generations. Through participation, the work asks what is lost, transformed, remembered, and reimagined as people, cultures, and other living things travel, meet, and find new homes.
Maria Guerra Sappho is a Nuyorican (Puerto-Rican from New York) composer, improviser, and instrument designer whose work explores diaspora, cultural memory, and the entanglements of bodies, technologies, and environments. She creates performances and installations where the human and the more-than-human meet to co-author creative worlds.
Rivers and Other Mother Tongues is on view at the basement of Instituto Cervantes from Thursday 10 to Sunday 13 September and is part of our installation program Resisting Waters.