Following an open call by the European Cultural Foundation in June 2023, an international jury has unanimously selected Liquid Becomings as the winner of a €500,000 commission to curate and host The European Pavilion 2024.
Liquid Becomings takes the form of four creative journeys by small boats along four of Europe’s greatest rivers: the Danube, the Rhine, the Tagus, and the Vistula.
Setting sail on 1st September 2024 for 28 days, the boats and their crews of artists-in-residence and a captain will each focus on different themes: Ruins and Monsters, Perimeters, Togetherness, and Bodies and Politics. Each of the boats offer a simple, sustainable and slow mode of travel. They’ll make space for the communities and people they’ll meet along the way, becoming home to durational residencies in which artists, citizens and academics are brought together in a travelling debate.
The artist crews will research ideas of new imaginaries, alternative living and speculative futures, experiencing the landscape, the elements and the people who live on the rivers from a unique, connected perspective. Conversations and creativity will be shared on the boats and on the river banks, and together, artists and citizens will explore and imagine the stories that will be told by the Europe of tomorrow – stories inspired by these four great waterways. This is a journey that is participative and contributory.
In November the boats and their crews will come together, docking in Lisbon to share what’s been gathered, imagined, discovered and questioned on the journeys at a three-day artistic celebration of performances, talks, debate and encounters. The programme will link the old port of Beato with Quinta Alegre, a socio-cultural complex located on the northern outskirts of Lisbon. It will open with Public Kitchenby teatro meia volta, a community and artistic event based on the multicultural cuisine of those who live in the parish of Santa Clara where stories around travel, migration and wishes for the future will be shared. The three days will include specially commissioned new work by Portuguese artists, including writer Gonçalo Tavares, performative, sound artist and musician Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and theatre maker Paula Diogo. The encounters, meals, rituals and stories will be translated into a new mythology for Europe – a future told by the rivers, a future told by all of us.
In awarding the commission, the jury said that Liquid Becomings offered a daring artistic format, one which challenged the standard model of national cultural pavilions. The movement across borders, drawing on the symbolic richness of water and emphasising the fluidity of European identity brought an unexpected and innovative perspective to the debate on Europe.
By giving a central place to artists and involving different communities along the Vistula, Rhine, Danube, and Tagus, as well as in the historic centre and outskirts of Lisbon, Liquid Becomings has the potential to have a lasting impact in today’s Europe and to help imagine a shared, polyphonic future.
Liquid Becomings is an espaço agora now production in partnership with FLOW, MS-Fusion, Teatro Meia Volta and United Artist Labour and has been curated by Bojan Đorđev, Laura Kalauz, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska, Siniša Ilić, Alfredo Martins, Annette Mees, Naomi Russell, and Olga Uzikaeva.
Initiated by the European Cultural Foundation in 2020, The European Pavilion shines a light on the question of Europe and its future(s) through cultural projects and art commissions. Stemming from the conviction that we need more cultural spaces that go beyond national remits to explore and imagine what Europe is and what it can, or should become, The European Pavilion contributes to the Foundation’s mission to strengthen the European sentiment. You can read more about the European Cultural Foundation here.
We’ll be posting more news as the project develops for you to see behind the scenes as we embark on this big adventure, so check back over the next few weeks and months!
Illustration © Sinisa Illić Image © MS FUSION © Rainer Prohaska / Bildrecht Vienna
