The present is an alien, an imperfect space. But memory is alive and flows, uncontrollably, like the torrents of water that it misses so much.
The sea, a river, a lake, the rain. For Gabriela Mistral, water is a return, a return to her childhood. Isn’t childhood an origin, what we are? Thinking about water, dreaming about it and writing it is nothing other than a return: to the beginning of life, to the most basic and original, to that which no one can ever detach.
The short-film To be water, by Valdemoros, is part of rest, stillness and sleep: it peacefully flows into movement, rhythm, the contact of two individual bodies merged into one. The water is the body. In the end, the aesthetic sense of contact returns to the beginning, to the root.
In “In Praise of Water”, Gabriela Mistral writes:
water is agile and has no object of its own … / water is agile and has no memory …
Water carries no memory because it is the genesis of everything. Water is as sacred as fire and, being apparently contrary elements (such as the man-woman dichotomy explored by Valdemoros), they have no other natural mission than to complement each other in order to procure life.
If we come from water, the most logical thing is that we end up returning to there. Although water is what leaks the fastest, it is also true that it is what lasts the longest. The same happens with memory. We forget that without water, there is nothing. We forget that water is memory.
According to data from the World Bank, in 2050 about a billion people would suffer from a lack of water supply. The causes, in addition to the accelerated population growth, are the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and the consequent pollution. We forget that without water there is nothing. We forget that water is memory.
Latin America is the region of the planet with the most water reserves, but 37 million of its inhabitants can not drink it. Agricultural and mining production works as if the water is enough and as if it will never end. Less than a fifth of the wastewater in Latin America receives treatment. We forget that without water there is nothing. We forget that water is memory.
