Ophelia & Santiago
Video,
color, stereo audio, 20’10’’, 2022
The video Ophelia & Santiago, A river story of love and tears from Geneva (CH) to Jalisco (MX) is part of an ongoing collaborative art & science project based on the anthropogenic, natural and cultural evolutions of water in different places of the Earth. It takes its source in a growing collaborations web of ecologist associations, indigene inhabitants, artists and scientific partners.
The title of the project is referencing to the famous Shakespearean character from the play Hamlet : the young Ophelia who is dying drowning in a river while picking up flowers. She constitutes a strong image in collective imaginary that assembles the ambivalent connotations of water linked with pureness, youth, origins as well as melancholy and death.
This chapter of Ophelia project is based in the regions of Geneva lake (CH-FR) and Guadalajara - Santiago river (MX). Through investigations and actions already underway concerning the Santiago River in Jalisco State, it participates in recording scientific datas and trace topologies and connections to Geneva Lake that hold stories, conceptual analogies and their poetic/scientific/social potentials.
The video intermingles local researches based on ethnography, political and scientific sources, together with myths, rumours, anticipation tales and philosophical notions. The logic of a rhizomatic research allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points, and carry a strongly polysemic dimension, using the potentials of both tales and datas.
In collaboration with :
Ana Torres Villarreal, Alterra Association, Un Salto de Vida Association
Le Chimiscope, Université de Genève
Co-production : Fondation Ernst et Lucie Schmidheiny, Université de Genève, Association Un Salto de Vida