Opening reception:Friday, May 29th, from 6-8pm. There will be a performance by the artist at 6pm.
“Hard, the solid doesn’t last; only soft water lasts…We are always swimming in this same river [and] in this same water.”
Michel Serres, Biogea
How does a river speak to us, and how do we learn to listen to its reverberations? The work of Leonel Vásquez unfolds through this question. His site-specific installation for 601Artspace, Como Volverse Caudal (How to Become a Stream), functions less as a set of objects and more as a portal through which we enter into communion with the waters that surround us and the more-than-human life that inhabits them.
Leonel Vásquez is a Colombian sound artist who has dedicated his career to facilitating sonic dialogue between humans and the more-than-human world as both a political and aesthetic act. His studio and base is the Estación de Escucha de Alta Montaña EEAM (The High Mountain Listening Station), a cultural biocenter he created in 2013 with his wife, Judy Esmeralda Vásquez. The center is located in El Romeral, a town in the high Andean region surrounding the Sumapaz Páramo cloudforest. At EEAM, visitors connect with the ecosystem through activities like walking, cooking, foraging and deep listening, fostering an awareness of the interconnections between daily lived experiences and the more-than-human life around us. EEAM fosters relational listening, an aural awareness of the rhythms and forces that shape this ecosystem. At EEAM, Vásquez tests what he calls “amphibian instruments,” which he creates in order to attune our perception of the various forms of natural life. Vásquez sees himself less as a singular artist or musician, and more as a conductor bringing into harmony the various natural forces that animate these instruments: water, wind, plants, animals, humidity, and the microbial life within the waters.
Como Volverse Caudal engages with water collected from the Mahicannituck River, at a site located roughly 90 miles north of New York City. Renamed the Hudson River following Dutch colonization in the seventeenth century, the river is a tidal estuary whose waters move in both directions, mixing freshwater with Atlantic saltwater and producing a constantly shifting composition and flow. The name Mahicannituck, associated with the Mohican Nation, translates as “the river that flows both ways.” Like many rivers shaped by modernity it bears the traces of human pollution, including decades of PCB contamination from General Electric and, more recently, the environmental effects of the Indian Point nuclear plant, which operated north of Manhattan until 2021.
In the main space of the gallery Vásquez has created a water temple, a large raised wooden platform that invites viewers to enter a state of contemplative listening. Two caudales—large cast aluminum bowls filled with water from the Mahicannituck River—are connected to ceiling-mounted string instruments. Rotating on their own axes, the bowls gently stir the water to match the velocity of the Hudson River’s current, which fluctuates between 1.3 and 1.8 meters per second. The water oscillates around the instrument’s sympathetic strings, secondary strings that vibrate through resonance rather than direct touch. Not unlike a violin’s bow, the water’s pressure activates the strings, producing harmonic currents reminiscent of the sound of the river. A second instrument, a kalimba, is based on a circular lamellophone, an instrument that produces sound when plucked. Instead of a hand, this kalimba is activated by the rhythmic fall of water droplets from a copper sculpture that hangs from the ceiling, reminding us that a single drop of water can slowly carve a rock or shape a mountain. This speaks to the geologic paradox of softness and force, how something as gentle as water can profoundly transform the landscapes we inhabit.
At the front of the gallery is “Canto Rodado Polifónico”, a sculpture composed of nine rotating stones that spin on their own axes. The series title Cantos Rodados is a play on the Spanish term for smooth river stones shaped by water currents, evoking the idea of stones singing, with canto meaning both “song” and “stone” in this specific context. Vásquez makes these instruments “sing” by setting them in motion and amplifying their sound through analog mechanical amplification systems. This spinning, scraping gesture recalls the movement of water as it erodes and transforms a stone, eventually shaping the earth.
Como Volverse Caudal (How to Become a Stream) is an invitation to enter into communion with water and to be in kinship with the rocks, streams, plants, and species that shape a river’s form over millennia. It also asks us to consider the environmental residue we leave behind as humans: the pollutants we deposit, the ecosystems we destabilize, and how this alters the composition and flows of riverbeds and waterways. In Vásquez’s work, the act of deep, careful listening to water becomes a way of understanding our relationship to the earth across time and space.
- Juliana Steiner
Learn more aboutLeonel Vásquez’s practice in the video below:
