On 29 June, the curators and the consortium of The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings in Belgrade announced the participating artists and the boat routes. The artists were selected after an open call in March 2024 to join the curators on four boat trips on four European rivers: the Danube, Vistula, Rhine and Tagus. Each team will follow its own route and explore new ways of being together. Along the way, the artistic crews reflect on a better, fairer and more sustainable future for Europe, one that is just and abundant for all.
The first boat leaves on the Danube on 27 August. The routes and participating artists were announced during a boat ride on the Sava and Danube rivers, which merge near Belgrade. Also presented were MOTILITY, Marija Balubdžić's newly composed theme song for Liquid Becomings, and Four Rivers, a series of textile paintings by Siniša Ilić inspired by the routes.
Travelling pavilion
The European Pavilion 2024 is not a classic architectural building or structure, but a journey, an adventure, a radical experiment. Liquid Becomings is a travelling pavilion that explores Europe's diverse communities and pluralistic societies. After sailing the four European rivers, the artistic crews will converge in Lisbon for a three-day festival on 7-9 November 2024.
Liquid Becomings has its origins in the symbolic richness of water and highlights the fluidity of European identity itself. The project adds an unexpected and innovative perspective to the debate on Europe.
The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings brings together artists and curators from 17 nationalities. It is a collaboration of international organisations led by the Dutch Pássaros Foundation and its network espaço agora now: Teatro Meia Volta (PT), MS Fusion (AU), United Artist Labor (SE), FLOW (PL), made possible by the European Cultural Foundation. Bojan Đorđev, Laura Kalauz, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska, Siniša Ilić, Alfredo Martins, Annette Mees, Naomi Russell and Olga Uzikaeva, with Agnieszka Brzezanska and Ewa Ciepielewska, are the curators of this project.
Participating artists
The artists participating in the residencies on the boats represent a wide range of practices, including visual and performing arts, writing, architecture and design. The curators selected artists with a keen interest in developing their artistic practice in relation to other artists, in order to jointly explore ideas about new imaginations, alternative lifestyles and speculative futures.
Crews will explore the landscape, elements and people living along the rivers from a uniquely connected perspective. This journey is participatory and collaborative. Each team will create documentation to be shared at the final event in Lisbon and beyond, including notes, drawings, films, soundscapes and recordings of interventions.
The selected artists are:
Danube
- Jaka Škapin, performance artist, composer and researcher
- Katarina Popović, visual artist, producer and graphic designer
- Elodie Olson-Coons, writer
- Elina Rodríguez, interdisciplinary artist and activist
- Niels de Vries, visual artist
Wisla
- Patryk Zakrocki, musician, composer and illustrator
- Malgorzata Markiewicz, visual artist
- Carola Uehlken, curator and artist-researcher
- Gosia Kępa, photographer
- Marta Niedbał, interdisciplinary artist
- Sophie Thun, photographer
- Małgorzata Kuciewicz, co-founder of the research and design studio CENTRALA
Rhine
- Flavia Barbosa Pinheiro, choreographer, researcher, performer and educator
- Keli Freitas, playwright, director and actress
- Isabel Soany, sound artist and documentary filmmaker
- Alicja Wysocka, visual artist
- Romuald Krężel, performing artist
- Martin Schick, performing artist, transformer, presenter, critical voice, activist
- Mette Sterre, interdisciplinary artist
Tagus
- Leila Chakroun, transdisciplinary researcher
- Bogdan Djukanović, visual artist
- Neda Kovinić, artist
- Pio Sebastian Torroja, member and co-founder of m7red, an independent network of socially engaged architects and spatial planners
- Viktor Vejvoda, artist
Short biographies of all the artists and curators are here to read.
A total of 37 independent artists and curators will sail along on the boats or create a commissioned work. Another 17 independent cultural collaborators support the project in various capacities behind the scenes.
The four routes
The four trips will cross 11 countries and cover a combined distance of 1,394 kilometres. Several stops are planned, but enough space and time will be left for unexpected encounters along the shores. With the four themes of "Ruins and Monsters", "Perimeters", "Togetherness" and "Bodies and Politics", the curators are giving a focus to the boats that have been developed as follows:
Danube
Civilisations, borders, empires, languages, minorities, connecting languages.
Wisla
Speculative ecology, campfire conversations as a way of being together, 'rewilding', systems thinking, sensory awareness.
Rhine
Transformation runs like a thread through a journey that begins with landscape, nature and history and ends with industry, economy and futures.
Tagus
Revealing a different face of Europe - small villages, nature and rural communities, uncovering local heritage and traditions on a river that carries themes of conquest, colonisation, mission, and even droughts.
Theme song and textile paintings
MOTILITY, written and produced by Belgrade-based performing composer Marija Balubdžić, is the theme song of Liquid Becomings. This instrumental piece sings of liquid friction in a riverbed and variations in water movement. By analogy with swelling masses of water, the rapid musical layers keep increasing in number. They speak for the river's innate engine, as its rhythmic symbol. The theme song can here be listened to.
Four Rivers is a series of four textile paintings representing the four rivers through which the residences pass. They combine both an organic, hand-drawn line that follows the course of the river, and geometric shapes that show intersections and boundaries through different colours. With dimensions of 140 x 200 cm, the textile paintings can serve as a flag or sail for each river.
Wisla prologue in Gdansk
A day before the Belgrade event, associate curators Agnieszka Brzezanska and Ewa Ciepielewska, and consortium partner FLOW organised a prologue to FLOW 2024 in Gdansk with a meeting at the Gdansk Shipyard. From there, they will travel by boat to Elblag to open FLOW's retrospective exhibition in collaboration with Centrum Sztuki Galeria Elblag on 4 July. These are the first official events of The European Pavilion 2024 on the Vistula.
The European Pavilion
Taking place every two years, The European Pavilion highlights Europe and its future(s) through cultural projects and artistic productions. Launched in 2020 by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), the programme follows the belief that we need more cultural space that transcends national borders in order to explore and represent what Europe is and what it can or should become.
In 2023, the ECF launched a €500,000 commission grant to be awarded to the most ambitious, imaginative and compelling artistic proposal for The European Pavilion 2024. By offering fresh and inspiring perspectives on Europe and its future, The European Pavilion contributes to a wider shared Europe and ECF's mission to strengthen a European feeling.
More information: theeuropeanpavilion.eu
2024: Liquid Becomings
Imagine the future of Europe is in your hands.
Four Rivers. Four Journeys | 27 August - 1 November 2024
Lisbon festival 7-9 November 2024
espaço agora now in partnership with Teatro Meia Volta, MS Fusion, United Artist Labor, FLOW.
Curators: Bojan Djordjev, Laura Kalauz, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska, Siniša Ilić, Alfredo Martins, Annette Mees, Naomi Russell and Olga Uzikaeva, with Agnieszka Brzezanska and Ewa Ciepielewska.
Liquid Becomings Team:
Production + technical team: Lucy Atkinson, Ricardo Costa, Dragana Jovović, Mariana Rolim, Ana Raquel Rodrigues, Ana Paula Teixiera, Hannah Tully
For MS-Fusion: Rainer Prohaska, Hanna Priemetzhofer, Florian Sorgo.
For FLOW: Piotr Jedynasiak.
Content Marketing: Mandy Martinez
Social Media Manager: Flávia Ruas
Design: Jan Tomza-Osiecki
Films: Dušan Čavić + Dušan Šaponja / Marka Žvaka
Press representative: Heidi Vandamme
Belgarde Press representative: Monika Husar / KomunikArt
Participating artists:
Alicja Wysocka, Bogdan Djukanović, Carola Uehlken, Elodie Olson-Coons, Elina Rodriguez, Flavia Barbosa Pinheiro, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Gosia Kepa, Isabel Soany, Jaka Škapin, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Keli Freitas, Katarina Popović, Leila Chakroun, Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Marija Balubdžić AKA Umbra, Marta Niedbal, Martin Schick, Mette Sterre, Neda Kovinić, Niel de Vries, Paula Diogo, Pio Sebastian Torroja, Patryk Zakrocki, Romuald Krezel, Sophie Thun, Viktor Vejvoda
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Commissioned by the European Cultural Foundation with additional support from Calouste Gulbenk
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