URBAN TALK
Friday, 05.12.2025, 6.00 p.m. | IfA Halle 4

Elizabeth Gallón Droste
Territo-Rivers: wetting the sediment of eco-social memory

In the world of rivers, the question is not only geography; it is how we make sense with water—daily life, affection, memory—water as force and portal. In Útica, where a mud avalanche redrew the ground, returns arrive as remote evocations: rumbles, names, images, songs that keep surfacing. This activation is an offering to listen with what persists and to ask: How do we listen to a territory’s memories—and let them manifest without fixing them? And further: what does it mean to be-long to the Earth, planetarily, when waters weave distant shores into one breath?. Rivers testify—they set rhythms and carry stories. Family and community archives call us back; pulsing, dis-sedimenting, overflowing. With Útica — under the murmuring waters, as book, process, and practice, we immerse in strategies to humedecer el sedimento (to moisten the sediment): tending living archives and attuning to what returns—rumbles, names, small currents, waters of dreams.

Photo © Elizabeth Gallón Droste

Elizabeth Gallón Droste is an artist, writer, and educator working with territories marked by socio-environmental tensions and living memory. Grounded in arts of listening and situated research, she learns with the agency of territorio-rivers as they re-mediate collective sense-making, attending to echophonies—stories, songs, images, vibrations—that stitch times and (im)materials. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Spatial Cosmology (HafenCity Universität Hamburg) and a member of the duo ~pes (since 2022). Her work has been presented at documenta15, Meandering (TBA21 Academy), RAW Material Dakar; she is the author of Útica, Under the Murmuring Waters (Oreri, 2024).

The earth we tread is a collaborative research project that wants to meet and propose insurgent land practices that pre-figure, defy, or grow outside extractivist, colonial, and property-based relations to land. The earth we tread works as an X-Tutorial seminar funded by the Berlin University Aliance.

Download poster here.