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Songs for Magdalena and Yamuna

2013-2021

HD Video

In 2013 Tania Candiani conducted an artist residency on Colombia’s Magdalena River, the nation’s major fluvial and commercial artery, where she produced a body of work that resulted in an exhibition that exposed some anachronisms that emerged in daily life in the city of Honda, mainly because of the construction of highways and the decline of river navigation in the previous century. It was during that exhibition where Candiani produced a film that honors Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), where a canoe sails the Magdalena River with a gramophone, playing the Blue Danube; the boat, the music, and even the river itself are all, symbols of unrestricted progress and its consequences. Years later, she repeated the poetic gesture by playing a grief song in Hindi with the exact same gramophone in the Yamuna river in India, a body of water that has also suffered from the byproducts of modernisation, and that is highly polluted.

For this exhibition, the rivers flow together and both canoes join to play music and chant side by side, with the hope for others to hear and join.