Pororoca: abraz(ç)o de río y mar

Pororoca: abraz(ç)o de río y mar is a project co-designed and developed by Catalina Mejía Moreno, Felipe Arturo and Gabriela Leandro Pereira and a multiplicity of voices and beings in Brazil, Colombia and the UK, following Catalina’s grant award in 2023 by re:arc Institute Public Discourse fund.

Pororoca, from the indigenous Tupi word ‘porórka,’ means ‘the great roar.’ A roar that can be heard when tidal waves of the ocean reach the mouth of a river. Pororoca, also known as the endless Amazon tidal bore, is born when the Atlantic tide pushes back against the river current creating a rise of water transformed into big waves. In other words, Pororoca is an embrace between sweet and salt waters, rivers and oceans; an encounter between two bodies of water merging into one.

Within the liminal space of the Pororoca many worlds come together, collide and merge. Waters from rivers bring with them the geological memories of continents, sediments of (neo)colonial and (financial, racial and other) capitalist models. Waters from the oceans bring currents of transnational commerce, oceanic waste and migratory routes embedded in our past and present. Waters from rivers and oceans bring with them traces of the climatic disaster driven by late capitalism and at the same time cosmological substances of ancestral memories and future possibilities. In their encounter, Pororoca exchanges and mobilises sediments that are critical and reparative. While Pororoca is a collision, it is also a dislocation and a resolution of a primal and contemporary conflict: what water brings is also what water can change.

This map - or counter-map- illustrates the geographical relationship between three river systems central to the Pororoca project: the Río Magdalena in Barranquilla (Colombia), the Rio Paraguaçu near Salvador (Brazil), and London's River Thames. The map's distinctive orientation emphasizes how these Atlantic-facing waterways connect to their respective seas—the Caribbean, South Atlantic, and North Sea—highlighting their shared maritime heritage despite their intercontinental distances. By Nica Rawhani-Sabet, 2024.

Pororoca encourages carving out space and time
to nurture situated dialogue and architectures of listening
to be attentive to colliding bodies and entities living alongside and with
colliding waters

Pororoca as prompt, a reality and a metaphor, pays attention to
the remnants and existing colliding forces of (neo)coloniality and imperialism
and to existing and countering site-specific practices, experiences, livelihoods that are nonlinear, plurivocal, and imperfect

Pororoca foregrounds the entanglements of
embodied,
spatial,
architectural,
urban and
territorial waters

Pororoca acknowledges the need
to expand understandings and sensibilities
to focus on re-awakenings and re-tunings to socio ecological pasts, presents and futures of brackish bodies of water
to nourish, to be grateful, to heal, to return and
to reclaim

Pororoca has been shaped through three immersions carried between 2023 and 2024:

Paraguaçu River
(Salvador/Recôncavo Baiano, Brazil)

Magdalena-Yuma
(Bocas de Ceniza Barranquilla, and Ciénaga Grande, Colombia)

Southend-on-Sea and London
(Thames estuary, United Kingdom).

These landscapes have been continuously transformed by the mouths of rivers and the influence of the seas, and their histories trace processes of spatial and multispecies adaptation, transformation, reparation but also monumental imperial efforts of land and water domestication and dispossession. In each immersion we have listened to what the water has allowed us to, and these acts of listening have taken shape in many different ways and have been translated, spatialised and materialised as chronicles, listenings, vessels and glossaries.

The project ethos is to foreground voices from the different colliding waters and their collective and life stories given to us as presents in each. Throughout the different index entries you will find a range of practices and responses; whilst some focus on individual reflections, some others are working on bringing these voices to the fore. The latter is still work in progress, and the core of this project. The single authored, co-authored texts, conversations, words and soundings part of this online repository are, then, just an attempt to best represent and share a multiplicity of experiences product of these conversations and both our individual and collective immersions.

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