L'eau d'ici is a journey through watery experiences: the one that separates a person from his or her land of origin, his or her identity in two; the one that nourishes or drowns, the one that heals us, makes us sway, drift; the one that requires several bodies to be crossed; but also the sea in the original sense of the term, the matrix that gives birth.
It is a hybrid form of visual and sound poems from which emerge fragments of imagined, encountered and incorporated voices. A floating choir that searches the fullness and emptiness of a memory that is both vivid and incomplete, organic and plural, in search of a primary essence.
L'eau d'ici is a polyglot performance and a video installation project initiated in 2021. It is the support of a long term research that develops in several chapters, each located in specific geographical areas where the stakes of water are inherent to their foundation, their history, their functioning, and now to their survival and future perspectives.
At the origin of existence, water shapes lifestyles, daily interdependencies, promotes symbiotic organization, impacts our geopolitics and our narratives. With L'eau d'ici we study the emotional, mythological, scientific, imaginary, poetic and memorial links that populations and civilizations have woven with this vital source. From multiple sources of documentation (scientific, media, historical), testimonies, visits and meetings located in the geographical area hosting the project, we create poetic texts and rewritings of the collected words. The textual corpus is then subject to an important linguistic work, where the translation becomes a material in itself of the project. At the same time, we capture videos, sound material, and invent gestures and scenographic elements that compose the score of each chapter.
Our challenge is to compose an international and intercultural collection of lived experiences and vital issues related to water. A sort of sensitive and multi-perspectivist atlas that mixes poetry, spontaneous speech, and scientific discourse, in order to arouse a sense of solidarity and a desire to care for water and for the Other. The project is also a reservoir of languages, which we enter through poetry. Images and expressions that offer different points of view on the ways of approaching the living, of interacting with the landscape, the nature, of conceiving knowledge, the daily necessities, the collective urgencies, to envision healthy and fair futures in the relationship between humans and environments.
In the video-poems we edit as polyptychs, we search for organic experimentation and transmission of the narratives. The images are superimposed, fuse, oscillate between abstraction and revelation, impregnated with what has merged into them. The play of transparencies reflects memories and sensations that telescope. Natural sounds, performed sound effects and sound distortions combine with the video material to compose an intimate environment where rationality wavers. The viewer's gaze wanders between different physical interiorities and atmospheric impressions.
