MARIA JOSE ARJONA
CURATED BY MELANIE ROUMIGUIERE
AND SUPPORTED BY DAAD BERLIN
FROM THE TEXT "RECORDINGS" BY MARIA JOSE ARJONA
TO MOVE NON-LINEARLY IS TO MATCH
SEDIMENT´S LOGIC
OSCILLATE!
TREMBLE!
SHIFT!
OSCILLATION / SEDIMENTATION / EROSION / MEANDERING / CONFLUENCE / SATURATION / OVERFLOW / SUSPENSION / TURBIDITY /
SINKING
FUGITIVITY / OPACITY / SINKING
A Manifesto in Sediment
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In the dominant epistemologies of visibility and legibility, presence is equated with exposure. To be seen is to be known, and to be known is to be classified, made usable, extracted. Against this logic, we invoke fugitivity, opacity, and sinking as interdependent modes of resistance, not as escapes from the world, but as methodologies of relation that refuse capture. These are not metaphors. They are tactics of being in a world structured by surveillance, transparency, and the violent clarity of colonial reason. To be fugitive is not simply to run — it is to inhabit the interstice, to remain in the world without being entirely held by its terms. It is to choreograph one's existence against the grammar of governance. It is the right to sidestep, to slide, to reconfigure movement as a political and poetic refusal.
Opacity, in this context, does not signify obscurity or vagueness. It is not the lack of knowledge, but the protection of complexity. Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity is not an aesthetic whim — it is a philosophical and ethical stance against reduction. To be opaque is to resist the violent simplification that underpins domination. Opacity protects the fullness of being from being translated into units of comprehension designed by and for regimes of clarity. It is a relational form of sovereignty: not isolation, but an irreducible difference within proximity. Opacity demands that relation remain relation — and not collapse into assimilation.
Sinking, then, is the movement that materializes these refusals. If fugitivity is the gesture and opacity is the shield, sinking is the temporality in which they unfold. Sinking interrupts the logics of linear time, upward mobility, and architectural power. It is the antithesis of monumentality. Where the archive of power seeks to rise — erect, accumulate, declare — we propose the archive of pressure, of depth, of sediment. Sinking is a method of writing into the world not through inscription upon, but through embedding within. It is time registered not by chronology but by compression. The sink is not a fall. It is an alignment with gravity, with the ground, with the layers that remember in silence.
To sink is to place knowledge where it cannot be extracted easily — where it must be felt, dwelled with, waited for. This is not disappearance, but density. Not loss, but accumulation. In the oceanic sense, the sink is not a void but a site of transformation, where rivers deliver their memory and the planetary sediment archive absorbs without hierarchy. The sinking body becomes part of this register — a form of writing that refuses legibility, yet insists on presence.
Fugitivity, opacity, and sinking combine a submerged poetics of survival. They form a counter-archive, not organized by logic, but by relation, resonance, and the refusal of clarity as a condition for value. In this submerged ontology, knowledge is not offered for extraction — it is offered for proximity. To know is not to master. To know is to be near, to be with, to endure the pressure of that which will never fully become surface.
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María José Arjona’s exhibition presents an ongoing interdisciplinary project that the artist has been developing since 2022. Bringing together video works, sound compositions, drawings, scores, photographs, and a manuscript, the project investigates the politics of memory, movement, and coexistence. The variety in the media expression of the individual components of the presentation reflects Arjona’s artistic practice, which, as a performance artist, engages spaces of resonance and movement across multiple, simultaneous formal languages.
How can movement be translated into text? What connects the act of capturing water in an image with the composition of sound? And what new relations emerge when fragments of a natural observation encounter a choreographic score?
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The works on view arise from Arjona’s long-term research into water, habitats, and acoustic ecologies across diverse geographical and political contexts. These include rivers such as the Magdalena, Guaviare, Palomino, Amazon, and Cauca in Colombia, the Hudson and Miami Rivers in the United States, and the Spree in Berlin. Her seven-part video composition Rio/River (2025) weaves together moving image studies from these sites with radically abstracted soundscapes. At times, the audio evokes birdsong or other traces of natural life; at others, it shifts toward the deep, reverberating tones of electronic sound. These layered explorations culminate in a body of work that is materially and conceptually fluid, embodying the artist’s interest in the interconnections between bodies, environments, and sonic ecosystems.
Echoing the exhibition’s title, a constellation of works on paper stretches the length of the room, like sediments, forming a current of overlapping inscriptions, a narrative composed of interwoven voices. The twists and turns of the water speak to the movement of bodies in the space, to the carcasses of drowned animals, and to the artist’s words: “To move non-linearly is to match sediment’s logic.”
Another central element of the exhibition is a manuscript, presented in this constellation for the first time in its complete form. This work foregrounds the unique, previously underexamined role of writing in Arjona’s practice. Like the other works on view, the manuscript remains open-ended and in progress. The entire project will be performatively activated and further developed later this year at the Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala, where it will continue to evolve as a living archive.
Drawing on performance, ecological thought, and archival theory, Arjona’s project reframes the archive not as a site of static preservation but as a dynamic, elastic field animated by choreographic attention. The work does not document but listens; it does not fix, but orients.
María José Arjona is a performance artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores time as a generative force in the construction of socio-affective structures. She repositions the archive not as a repository of the past but as a living interface for imagining collective, horizontal futures. With a background in contemporary dance and long-durational performance, Arjona integrates sound, drawing, movement, and experimental writing to create choreographic environments that activate perception and memory through embodied attention. She is currently a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2024–2025).
Curation/text by Melanie Roumiguière.