Passing Water at McaM Shanghai

“We all emerge from and return to waters. Water brings us together, into community, into connection and into friendship. Waters shape the relations between our watery selves and our watery others.
We assert that waters themselves have their own intelligences. If winds, currents, glaciers, and volcanoes carry subtle messages that are so difficult to read that it takes us absolutely ages to decipher them, wouldn’t it be appropriate to call them intelligent? What if it turns out that we are merely the slowest and least intelligent beings in the world?”

—Sarina Scheidegger & Jimena Croceri

The contemporary art performance “Passing Water” hosted by McaM and supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council will be presented at McaM on January 15, 2022. This water-related performance was created by Swiss artist Sarina Scheidegger and Argentine artist Jimena Croceri. 4 actors will use their body, voice, behavior, etc. to interpret “water” and express the relationship between body, human, nature and “water”.

This is an attempt by the McaM to cooperate remotely under the epidemic. Although the 2 non-domestic artists could not be present at the scene, they still participated in the discussion and rehearsal through emails and phone calls to ensure the quality of final presentation of the performance. Art communication is just like water. It always flows.

We can first learn something through the sketch that artists created for rehearsal:

“All of this biology, all of this chemistry, all of this affect, this politics, economics and ethics – all of this is contained in that glass of water from which you sip… We are created in water, we gestate in water, we are born into an atmosphere of diffuse water, we drink water, we harbour it, it sustains and protects us, it leaves us – we are and we stay always, to some extent, in it. ”

——Sarina Scheidegger & Jimena Croceri

 About Sarina Scheidegger

The different forms of working and thinking together and developing projects in collaborations have been a major subject in my artistic practice for the last couple of years. I worked in various constallations and collaborations – in the field of performance based on textual concepts together with Ariane Koch and with Stingray Editions in the context of writing, editing and printed matters. With the Argentinian artist Jimena Croceri I recently realized a new series of performances connected to the issue of water(politics), hydrofeminsim and fluidity.

At the moment I am exploring different and new angles to continue working in collaborations but also following individual projects and interests. Through my residences in Buenos Aires Bogota and Santiago de Chile my thinking and therefore also my artistic practice has been influenced by these places and the people I have met there. I am currently investigating the water issues and water politics in different places and with diverse perspectives to continue my research with fluid conditions, feminist approaches in connection with water themes and also the influences of water in our ways of acting and thinking.

About Jimena Croceri

Jimena Croceri (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist who use diverse media. Her artistic practice is characterized by intention and experiment, by resistance and fluidness. In a laboratory method that isn’t either rational or sterile but more curious than precise her work consists of various elements which are all protagonists: time, chance, collaboration, correlation and coincidence—they don’t diminish authorship but neither do they foreground it. Producing collective knowledge with others around her (humans and no humans) has been very important for her practice for the last few years. Using both daily materials and naturally occurring elements her work probes soft spots between gestures and rituals which became new methods for performance, videos, drawings, installations or sonic compositions.

(Banner image: Jimena Croceri and Sarina Scheidegger, Passing Waters, Ausstellungsraum Klingental, 2021. Photo: Simon Krebs.)