Glimpses into The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings festival in Lisbon
13 Nov 2024
Under the banner ‘Imagining the Future of Europe’ the festival concluded The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings from November 7 -9. For three days, a multidisciplinary programme put artistic creation and reflection at the heart of the debate on Europe’s future, promoting meaningful dialogues between artists and local communities.
There is something important in people, something that’s dying – the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.
John Cassavantes
That is the quote Nomai Russell, founder of espaço agora now, and one of the curators of The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings, chose to open her contribution in the programme booklet. She continues: “Liquid Becomings as The European Pavilion 2024 has been a radical artistic experimentand exploration of Europe through its rivers. We chose rivers not because of climate, but because we felt an urgency to turn our gaze to the perimeters, the less visible places, and to put ourselves in a dynamic space of unknowing: natural precariousness, vulnerability, unpredictability. An act of resistance to make time to experiment with what it means to think and feel together, to reflect on belonging and the potential for collective futures.
By encountering fragility as part of the experience of art making, we wanted to have the courage to ask as temporal communities: What amongst ourselves do we share? How can we become a “we”?
Naomi Russell ends her contribution with these words:
“What Liquid Becomings has really done is quite simply opened a door. It has posed many deeper questions for exploration. How, as artists, can we collectively and individually, slowly and carefully, nurture and build alternative structures including within ourselves? Can we stand in solidarity so as to be capable of response in a world including a Europe that is dying of sadness? We don’t yet have the answers. But it is vital: To be fully present in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings. To make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present [Donna Haraway].
To stay with the trouble is where the real work happens.
To acknowledge our fragility and build our sense of self so we can become together and act together.
To stay Liquid.
