Comunal, 2025. Live site-specific performance for ‘Fem Safareig’.
This site-specific performance, Comunal, was created for Fem Safareig, organised by CERE (Centre d’Estudis de la Ribera d’Ebre).
In the historic washhouse of Riba-roja d’Ebre, I attempted to reactivate the space through a thirty-minute live performance. Once a site of domestic labour and whispered exchanges, the lavadero became, for me, a resonant chamber of memory, gesture, and sound.
A layered soundscape filled the air — women’s voices, birdsong, echoes — interwoven with Catalan words. These words became prompts for me, directing my actions: to write, to erase, to overwrite again. With charcoal and water, I inscribed fragments of text and form on the walls, then blurred, rubbed out, and rewrote them in a slow cycle of marking and unmarking.
The act became a ritual of persistence and disappearance, echoing the invisible labour of the women who once gathered in this place. Writing and erasing was not linear but cyclical — gestures repeated, undone, and redone — embodying the stratified, rewritten nature of memory itself.
Working barefoot with cloth, charcoal, and water, I engaged with the architecture of the lavadero as both surface and witness. The space was not only occupied but, through my gestures, temporarily transformed — a communal site reclaimed through body, voice, and action.
Comunal did not seek closure or narrative resolution. Instead, it opened a space for reflection: on how the histories of women’s work and presence are inscribed, erased, and reinscribed, leaving behind not fixed images but traces of embodied memory.