Water in our bodies and in our environment clears a path for new forms of solidarity that saturates all notions of borders, whether cultural, national or aesthetic. Based on this approach, Mexican-Chilean-Austrian artist Amanda Piña has developed ‘Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua’ (Border/Procession – A Ritual of Water), a performance that reveals a struggle against oppression and dispossession alongside hip-hop, colonial history, indigenous practices and mysticism. The performance is presented in mid-July as part of the festival “Breathing Rivers” at Radialsystem.

The performance is part of Piña's long-term project ‘Endangered Human Movements’, which explores centuries-old dances and forms of movement that are in danger of disappearing. ‘Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua’ is based on a street dance – developed by Rodrigo de la Torre – that is usually performed by men, and which originated in the El Ejido Veinte neighbourhood of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border of Mexico and the United States. A border town on the Rio Grande marked by violence, drug trafficking, militarization and cheap labour. The dance is part of the so-called ‘Danzas de Conquista’ (Dances of Conquest), originally conceived by the Spanish crown to represent the Christian victory over the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula. It was also used as a racist propaganda tool in Abya Yala (a pre-colonial name of the American continent), but, over the centuries, the meaning of the dance has changed to a “Danza de Frontera” – a dance expressing resistance, "reconquest" and self-determination.

For Amanda Piña, the border is not just a place, but a sign inscribed in bodies: a sign against any colonial paradigm of universalism shared only by those who embody a common history of oppression.

In ‘Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua’ Amanda Piña works with artists from her own company, which is part of ‘Danza y Frontera’, as well as professional and non-professional dancers from Berlin, with the aim of strengthening solidarity with and between women. ‘Un Ritual de Agua’ sees itself as a kind of manifesto that envisions a feminist political order through which our future can be nurtured and regenerated.

„Breathing Rivers“-Festival

Located on the Spree River, Radialsystem was originally one of Berlin's first pumping stations, diverting wastewater from the rapidly growing city in the late 19th century. As part of the summer festival “Breathing Rivers,” today's Radialsystem explores our relationship to life and water from 20–23 July 2023 with works by choreographers Amanda Piña, Lina Gómez and Luísa Saraiva. “Breathing Rivers” aims to open spaces of experience in which we collectively remember the continuity of all that is living, which has experienced ruptures through the thought and action of European modernity. Disruptions between human and nature, body and mind, or through cleaving categorizations such as gender and race, behind which exploitation, violence and injustice find their justification. A re-consideration of the inseparable embeddedness of the human being in a larger context begins here with the body as a place of experience and knowledge production. Instead of a notion of a universality of knowledge, Breathing Rivers proposes a multiplicity of possibilities of knowledge production that emerges with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.