HYDRA (Anna Gloria Flores) with Meghan Sabik
Lecce, Italy
Performance
Duration: 2h
We call this a lament, but it is not only sadness. It is a scaffold where interconnected entities interlace: membranes and ritual architectures hold the frame of washing and renewal; practices of grief, chorus, and soap alchemy fold daily labour into ritual vessels of care; accessible technological tools render these gestures into an archive of reproduction, and rhythm, coding repetition as resilience. The wash, the chant, and the record become interdependent organs of the collective body. Together, they distribute weight, attention, and grief across a liquid structure where labour is not hidden but shared, and where care is a technology both ancient and future-facing. The Moiras measure and cut, but here each cut becomes a knot, binding our practices into a cycle without finality—soap dissolves back to soil, voices dissolve into water, data weaves into living memory.
The bathtub fills slowly: with membranes peeled from walls, soap frothing with ash and blood, stitches and threads unravelled, whispered archives and memories, feeding in arid fields, and the fertile rot of decomposition. pouring its stream into the same basin, what is shared is liquidity—mutable, porous, dissolving boundaries between self and other, body and landscape, grief and renewal.
a ritual laboratory where soap, chanting, and care transform remains into vessels of grief. Cycles of cleansing and resonance, embodying lament as collective self regulation technology of mourning.
membranes become liquid memory, skin that preserves architecture as a living organism; mythic bodies arise from sweat, tears, and puddles. Imagination reshapes ecology.
loops and woven threads make nets of relation, attuning bodies to repetitive, meditative rhythms; sound maps hydro-affective memories into a shared sonic ritual; symbolic dinners conjure water through absence: ancestral ties between agriculture and care.
Textiles are unfinished monuments of slow resistance;
Decomposition, with its bacteria and fungi, reveals that decay is also abundance, transformation, and pleasure.
Together, these practices reject linearity. They create porous monuments—skins, soaps, nets, sounds, meals, weavings, decompositions—each incomplete on its own but flowing together into a common current. The bathtub is not a container of separate entities but a well of exchange. Grief becomes fertile and memory remains fluid.
In the bathtub of the Moiras, skin, sweat, blood, soil, tears, rot, chant, lather. It dissolves the false borders of human and nonhuman, past and present, wound and healing.
lament is not an ending but an ongoing becoming…