2023-2024

Mother River

Video Installation

Textile, sound, video duration 08:31

Participation as a member of Pluriversity Weavers, Fellowship in the Soils Project: an on-going research-based experimental project by Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia and Struggles for Sovereignty, Indonesia.

The Heart of the World is guarded by the Kwarte Umuke community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in today Colombia.  

 They guard the ancestral knowledge from their territory and invite us to remember who we are with Earth. They gifted each member of the Pluriversity Weavers a “woven letter”: an invitation to link our thinking with the soil on which we are standing and acknowledge the plurality of the world. The Pluriversity respondents in the Netherlands, Aldo Esparza Ramos, LI Yuchen,  Ana Bravo Pérez and Aliki van der Kruijs, respond to the letter collectively, yet with their own soils and positionality.

This invitation is an open one: where are you thinking from?

Above and underneath the soil, water is the limitless connector of different bodies, of thoughts and memories.

Provoked by the woven letter, LI Yuchen started to think-feel with the water in her body and beyond. Red thread embroidered on a fabric the same as her size, the mother river appears, travels through her own veins and lived experiences. Water continues to flow, flows into the communal memories, remembering the worlds that have been lost and mourning what cannot be undone, with the change of landscape caused by the biggest dam in the world.