Voices in the Water

One of five projects selected and funded by the Goethe Institute’s Neighborhood Interpretive Center cultural programs initiative in the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood, Voices in the Water is an embodied storytelling project created by interdisciplinary performance artist Nefertiti Charlene Altan and curator and cultural studies scholar Dr. Robin Garcia that centers the voices and experiences of Latinx, immigrant, indigenous individuals who have lived, worked, or moved through Macarthur Park, located in the ancestral, stolen territory of Tongva native peoples. Like the complex and layered history of the park, this project revolves around water and its sacred power to move, remember, speak, and listen.  The artists asked nine individuals to share their stories of water and Macarthur Park through an interview methodology that begins with a guided movement practice—Moving Your Inner Waters— to bring individuals into a somatic state. The sounds and memories that emerge when in a state of embodiment reveal intersecting streams of consciousness between one's inner rhythm, inner waters, and the waters around us. The resulting 19-minute audio storytelling installation is a reflection on how water has the power to act both as a historical container and a conduit to embodied memory. It is a meditation on the waterways and diasporic communities of Los Angeles who are both in constant relationship with a changing urban landscape, an evolving climate crisis, memory, resilience, community survival, healing, and renewal. Methodology The artists conducted and recorded interviews with local community members who have a relationship with the Macarthur Park community. Stories shared became the foundation from which this sound installation was built. In order to activate a multidimensional awareness, open up communication with deep memories and tell stories from an embodied state, participants were first guided in a somatic-based movement practice, Moving Your Inner Waters, developed by Nefertiti Charlene Altán, Nirlyn Seijas, Ana Brandão and Thiago Cohen, former members of the performance collective Deslimites Mediações Artísticas in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From this embodied place, participants were prompted with questions to share memories, songs and sounds with the artists and a bowl of water present to energetically absorb what was being shared. Participants were then invited to speak to that water, and share intentions for the healing of Macarthur park lake and the surrounding community. That water was later taken to Macarthur Park and poured into the lake in a participatory ritual of returning one's inner water stories, back to water.  Through this inner waters exercise, the body is brought to a threshold where time and space collapse and deep memories emerge from the nebulous realm of the unconscious. This watery location is unbound by the limitations of the rational mind. We are able to travel deep into a space that allows us to see ourselves, our reflection and ask how do the waters inside us see us? As a liberatory method of storytelling, this process privileges the deep wisdom and reservoir of knowledge of the body and allows for an archeology of our own remains.  This process was done in settings that were most accessible to community members; a community food distribution center near the park, a home bathroom with good sound quality, a few different living rooms and a kitchen. Trust was established between the participants and the project team who provided a platform of support and encouragement when going through the inner waters exercise. This project is a living communal process and we invite your participation in experiencing the sound installation and optional engagement in our continued process of sharing inner water stories back with water itself.