Encuentro en el río

Because rivers flow and never turn back, because their waters are endlessly refreshed, they have been allegorically and tediously assimilated to major issues such as the passage of time or identity. It is difficult for them to exist on their own, also in films. When looked at carefully, rivers could be considered the pinnacle of God’s art and yet they are barely used as a kind of eye-catching itinerant backdrop for human intrigues. For every water snake we see a hundred dams, locks, towpaths, bridges and harbours. Twenty boats for every poplar tree. Fifty draveurs (log-drivers) and one, single beaver. Fish always caught or about to be caught. And we will see dams, the greatest violence that rivers can be subjected to.
Rivers distribute water and humankind intervened very early on in how that water was dispensed. We will hear the words “control” or “dominance” used arrogantly and with the best of intentions, in countries with ideologically opposed regimes but united in the fundamental idea that nature “is there for free”. Moreover, conservation does not leave a mark, it does not transcend. Destruction however does. (For example, an illustrious engineer and writer once branded the regions flooded by a reservoir that he designed and that today bears his name as “fossils”). Even so, despite all of this and in support of the films, we will find ourselves in the rivers of the cinema as well as in the Arga river, arg meaning clear and 61 luminous; since the rivers will shine and enlighten us.

The retrospective is curated and the texts are written by Miriam Martín