MORAG COLQUHOUN

afonydd dwfn / deep rivers / uku mayu / los ríos profundos, 2023

Deep Rivers (Los Ríos Profundos in Spanish and Uku Mayu in Quechua) is the title of the 1958 novel by the Peruvian writer, José María Arguedas, and Deep River is the African American spiritual that Paul Robeson sings with Welsh miners in the 1940 Ealing Studios film, The Proud Valley. My video installation, Afonydd Dwfn | Deep Rivers | Uku Mayu | Los Ríos Profundos, sits in the chasm between these two offerings.

The work comes out of my connections to two communities: Elan Valley reservoirs in mid Wales where I was artist in residence, and Chamana in the Peruvian Andes, where I worked on an archaeology project restoring Inca irrigation systems. Central to the installation is biochar, which I first discovered being made by a hill farmer in Elan Valley. YouTube videos reveal how pre-conquest, indigenous Amazonian people used biochar to create fertile terra preta soils still present in the Amazon region today. Because it sequestrates carbon, combats drought, and provides a home for micro-organisms that aid plant growth, biochar has massive potential to counteract the negative effects of climate change and industrial food production.

A film depicting my own biochar production loops asymmetrically beside a longer playlist of found videos from both continents, activating a grainy disjointed yearning for planetary connection. Footage of biochar that has just been quenched with water marks the point at which the first part of the film meets the second part: a kind of hinge between water-based biological growth and the carbon-neutral physical combustion of plant material in the biochar kiln. In the garden ecology, biochar links carbon, water and food chains so that each element supports rather than depletes the others. Borrowing an idea from the Brazilian Quilombola activist Antônio Bispo dos Santos, whose video, Confluências (Do Morro Produções, 2021), is presented in the installation, I see biochar as a ‘confluência’ between planetary need and reconciliation.

return to exhibition / arddangosfa / exposición