Live performed and recorded in Cowgill, Yorkshire, April 2020

Rivers of Change and Unaswerable were made in the second chapter of the collaborative residency “Riverrs of Thoughts’. This second chapter of the residency, called “Breathing Tides” aimed to further develop concepts and artwork initiated individually and collectively by the artists on their first residency at “Olho de Boi” by the river Tejo in Lisbon. The ‘Breathing Tides’ residency was to take place in London in April 2020, by the river Thames but  it had to be adapted to the unforeseen context and dimension of the Covid 19 pandemic. Faced with the problem of how to connect their individual and collective practices, they had to introduce a new modus operandi/way of working. Through set times, between 8 of April – 19 of April 2020 the artists focused on their practices and shared at the end of the day the visual material they produced, their thoughts, notes and exercises shared via online platforms. Marta Angelozzi worked in Lisbon, Portugal; Celine Tchahtil in Basel, Switzerland and Elena Checchinato in Yorkshire England.

Every day I drew and wrote with water for an hour non stop- and time. Using the Abysmal as a starting point, I developed a series of videos, recording real-time performed writing in response to the notion of change and water. I wanted to captured the inevitability of change and the impermanence of time and its memories. I used the element of water and automatic writing: I wrote affirmative words with their negative prefixes un such as undo-unlearn-unbe-unsee-unloved- on a black paper against the sun. As the heat made the water evaporate and the words disappeared every time she rewrote them with water, the importance of destruction in the creativity process became clearer.