Sequere, a corporealisation of memory
The water from the mouth enters the ouroboros1 vessel, surrounded by fishermen who well-say the act and the journey it will undertake upstream to return to the source impregnated with the happening of the territory / The cycle begins again, back to its origin, the Segre / The first steps become 30 km / An old Camí de Sirga is furrowed by two walkers who keep laying down another route / The body of time takes on the consistency of the river’s inverse course / The steps think the vehemence of the sun / A horse appears at the border between the Camí de Sirga and the city / The horse watches us: it is we humans who carry the weight of dreams / In Amposta the hospitality of a community awaits the arrival of the pitcher and will join the walking, embodying its trace / It is the project Sequere’s first walk / The first traces impregnated in the water.
“When we wander through the world, what counts is not the head but the feet”2
With listening in the feet and the gaze in the roots, an artist and a psychoanalyst begin a journey that will walk through territories where memory, history and time will be crossed on foot. The two go skirting and embroidering the river, tacking together the cracks, the punctured quality of memory. With other bodies –those who join the journey– they go constituting another map of the territory, making exist other routes that were banished by progress, by the effects of climate change, by the wounds of war, still open. They read the territory with their feet, from the performativity of experience, in a retracing of the head and an entering into the dimension of another gait, that where events take on another corporeality and sensoriality strikes the senses once lost, which surface to memory. Remnants of what was seen and heard become the raw material of the journey. With Sequere, words that were asleep awaken again. Found words go outlining stories of rival banks and, drop by drop, configure fragments of the territory’s history: progress, the arrival of the train, the migrations, the farewell of the train, electric light, water cuts, the law of oblivion, the submerged villages, the climate emergency, the ailments of the land and the futures of hope with a democratic memory.
Thread by thread, the Ebro begins to be ascended towards the Segre / The banks are outlined / Skirting the river, fallow stories sound / Sketches of other routes / Forgotten paths / Words that needed an outline to cease being stagnant / The body becomes instrument / Memory goes embodying itself.
To traverse a gesture on foot has a certain consistency, an oneiric “corposity” that allows, as if it were a game, letting one’s own voice speak to the water, giving an outlet to a new future. To contribute to the cracking of the silence —that which was marked by a pact, that of Oblivion, and which still today continues to subject the word to banishment— allows what remained unsaid to be threaded together (thread by thread). In each singular encounter of the path, of the community that accompanied and accompanies this gesture, the words were incorporated into the ouroboros-pitcher created by the artist to contain that flow of the eternal return, which never ceases to repeat itself, which never stops existing and insisting identical to itself and always different, and which finds a small modification on being walked.
We return the water to the source, but on condition of giving it back with a small difference: impregnated with memory.
Noris collects water from the river in each segment of the day in order to paint; the next day he returns it to that same river that is no longer the same and takes another little piece belonging to another territoriality of the path but to the same river. With each fragment of water he traces a clue, in each watercolour he installs a trace, the territory becomes covered with reminiscences that inscribe memory.
The project becomes populated with traces and records in a constant pulsation between remembering and forgetting. Walking as an act of reparation is proposed to the territory in order to darn that hole of trauma that is updated with the constant return and insistence of the real.
The journey of the water that has reached the mouth and returns to the source becomes impregnated with the voices and the memory of the territory gathered over 44 days of walking. Words that adhere to the symbolic act are spoken in order to have another destiny; words that are sheltered in a space of saying *called* Sequere become part of the memory of the water, undoing the foreignness that oblivion provokes, with a new inscription.
As if this small act named Sequere were about, among other things, that awakening from the drowsiness of oblivion, in a performative act that transcends the artist and the path, blurring forms in order to generate questions about time, history, memory and becoming “in emergency”.3
To halt the passing of time, to provoke a suspension, to make an inverse path so that each step banishes oblivion. To leap outside the temporal dimension in order to rewrite –and perhaps inscribe– another trace. To traverse the exiled, voiceless paths and begin to sew them into a text that walks with the project.
How to assemble the text of the body Sequere, woven of multiple dimensions? The writing of the territory goes constituting itself as a trace of language, the letter embodying itself in word, and thread by thread the text becomes map.
The artist goes ahead of the psychoanalyst, «is ahead of him» says J. Lacan. In this artistic project that takes root in the wounded earth in order to repair it, the steps of the artist and psychoanalysis intertwine in a writing that attempts to suture the wounded memory and wagers on a mended future.
The Sequere gesture is a project that installs memory from a symbolic and collective act. Different threads are joined in a weave of stories gathered along the route. New maps are constituted in a new inscription. At the end of the route something remains recorded as a first trace that can no longer be erased and from which other representations will be threaded in order to constitute memory, and they will slide along other channels but from the river of the collective, which will sound in another language, that of memory.
part of this symbolic act resides in that
a small act of new collective binding
that may allow a new becoming…
In that NEW SAYING resides its inscription. Each time this journey is remembered, each time something is written about this project, the tacking of Sequere will continue in its flow and will be born again in the pen of each writing bird and tributary writer.
Perhaps this small artistic gesture will make us leap out of the journey of amnesia and return us to the creation of a new collective text, in order to make exist and give consistency to the words that were outside the path, to make them our own and give them a new channel.
Traces of memory / Mnemic traces that recorded steps / Steps that walked again abandoned routes / Steps that were walked again by other feet that, thinking, entered into oblivion in order to awaken it.
Already at the source, at the origin that is beginning and end of the route, we throw the water that, modified by all the territory crossed, awaits a new birth.
Celeste Reyna (1977, Córdoba, Argentina) is a psychoanalyst and teacher. She has worked in the public and private spheres for 20 years. Her interest and work focus on collective projects related to access to psychoanalysis for all and the creation of devices where listening, the word and artistic tools promote the elaboration of distress. In recent years, out of the need to resort to subjectivising community practices, she has worked and works on different artistic projects, interweaving art and psychoanalysis.
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Ouroboros (from the Greek oyrá, tail, borá, food). ⤶
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Words of Francesc Tosquelles from a walking of the land traversed by exile (F. Tosquelles: “Tosquelles, Como una máquina de coser en un campo de trigo”, p. 80. Co-edition CCCB, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Arcadia, 2022). ⤶
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Climate change became evident during the journey: it forced changes of course, the abandonment of routes, the listening to remnants and bombs that gave notice of the buried history and the present-day emergency. ⤶