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Un puerto para las palabras. Conversation between Velia Vidal and Juan Mosquera

A conversation between Velia Vidal and Juan Mosquera around four works from the exhibition Desafiar. Atravesar el sol desde un gran Pacifico, related to literature, water, and Afro representation.

Bodies of water emerge in the exhibition Desafiar as political subjects, identity landscapes, navigable documents, territories of resistance, and healing and mystical divinities. This vital relationship between the seas, rivers, and basins with the bodies and forms of Black and Afro-descendant representation in the Pacific is evident in the publications of Chocoan writer Velia Vidal, who persistently alludes to the rivers and seas that flow through and connect Choco and Antioquia and that have been essential to the construction of her own identity as a writer and cultural promoter.

In the case of Eblin Grueso, the Timbiqui River and the Pacific Ocean are present in her performative piece as mortuary territories through which the victims of mining and armed conflict in Colombia pass. For Casa Futura and Riso Tura, editorial projects from Cali and Buenaventura, through their project Traer el mar, the sea questions the connections and territorial tensions between the Pacific and Antioquia, and to that end, this traveling publication navigates between both territories as a compilation of narratives, gestures, and images.

Likewise, the presence of bodies of water is fundamental in the photographic and sound installation by the collective Las Jaibas. Through their work Oshum y los tonos del agua, they examine the spiritual relationship that some Afro communities and queer bodies have with the Cauca, Anchicaya, and Dagua rivers.

In this conversation between Vidal and Mosquera, both writers, literature serves as a medium and symbolic space to harbor the spaces of resistance, re-signification, comfort, and healing that Black and Afro-descendant communities find in the waters that bathe the Pacific coast.