Weaving Waters

October 10th – November 7th
Artists: Roshni Kavate, Violeta Ortega Navarrete, Gian Padilla Suarez & Jahel Guerra Roa 

Roshni Kavate, Violeta Ortega Navarrete, Gian Padilla Suarez, and Jahel Guerra Roa are established practitioners in their respective mediums of textiles, performance, and photography. For Weaving Waters, they have chosen to dissolve the boundaries of individual practice, creating a collaborative textile altar installation that functions as living architecture—a spatial practice designed for reconnection with the bodies of water that flow within and around us.

The artists will construct an installation that weaves together ancestral mythologies, indigenous cosmovisions, and decolonial perspectives into a unified ritual space. While the mediums appear diverse— textiles dyed with natural pigments, participatory performances, photographic portraiture, and woven sculptures—there is a profound underlying current that reflects our shared relationship to water as life force and endangered territory.

For this collective, this exhibition will represent a shared mourning for what has been lost—and a radical reimagining of what might be restored. They illuminate that our relationship to water, like our understanding of ecology, is not fixed but constructed. As Donna Haraway suggests through her concept of “naturecultures,” that relationship is continually reshapeable through conscious practice and collective engagement.

Central to the work is activating community connection in a space of confluence and merging. Discovery and relationship-building will unfold organically through listening sessions, communal dinners, and public readings. Drawing from Torkwase Dyson’s understanding of how spatial architectures can hold both refuge and resistance, the artists will work alongside community members to create “altar architecture”—structures that function as sites of gathering and contemplation, spaces where the urgency of ecological care meets the intimacy of personal transformation.

What may at first seem to be an intimate exploration of our emotional water bodies expands to encompass the collective trauma of ecological destruction and colonial extraction. The altar architecture they will create will serve not as a monument but as a portal: a threshold space where mourning and regeneration can coexist, where listening becomes a form of ecological practice.

Memory will play a pivotal role in the installation, evoking relationships to water that colonization and capitalism have severed. The artists draw upon ancestral knowledge systems that understood water as formless, genderless, and borderless—qualities that existed before the commodification of natural resources.

By presenting an installation that moves beyond individual artistic security, the collective actively engages in cultural reweaving. In collaboratively dismantling the extractive relationships they have inherited, they affirm a conscious commitment to regenerative practice.

Weaving Waters becomes both question and answer—an invitation to remember that we are, fundamentally, bodies of water learning to care for bodies of water, through the radical acts of listening, sharing, and gathering together.