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There are rivers that run quietly under the city, carrying histories we rarely hear. In Zürich, the Sihl flows beside concrete embankments, beneath train lines and office towers, its currents reshaped by centuries of engineering. 

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The Mapuche artist Neyen Pailamilla approaches water as part of an interconnected web where human and more-than-human lives meet. The Sihl carries memories and agencies. Their performances, installations, and films are not about the river, but with the river — and with the concrete, the steel, the stones, the plastic. They reclaim the bastardies produced by urban development, absorbing them through gestures of touch, of shared breath, of listening to what flows beneath the surface.

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The water crisis is not only material but social: it emerges from the ways we imagine what water is, what we believe it can do for us, and what we think we can do to it. In Pailamilla’s work, this imagination is unsettled and reconfigured. The Sihl is neither infinitely servile nor mute; it bears the traces of its entanglement with human histories, from urban growth to colonial legacies carried across oceans. We all inhabit fractured landscapes. The task is not to return to an imagined purity but to learn how to dwell creatively in impurity and multiplicity.

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Since arriving in Switzerland, Pailamilla has sought ways to bond with these new territories. Their encounters with the Sihl have given rise to a Protocol for Domestic Waters — a loose set of acts and moments that acknowledge all the living beings flowing from the Alps to the city through the Sihl, and intermittently reaching back to mapu anew.

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Protocol for Domestic Waters is an invitation to meet the river not as a utility, but as a companion; to think of water not as a commodity, but as a co-creator of place. Amid the quiet eddies and the noise of urban transformation, Pailamilla proposes another way of inhabiting damaged landscapes—one that neither romanticizes purity nor resigns itself to loss, but seeks continuities of care, reciprocity, and presence.

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Public Program:

 

13.09. 6.00 pm Vernissage

04.10. 6.00 pm Fluid conversation with artist and friends

12.10. 4.00 pm Finissage: Perfomance + Food

 

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