On Sunday 21st of September 2025, I walked through the streets of Riba-roja d’Ebre, barefoot – sweeping as I reached the old washhouse. The stone was cool, the air carried echoes, and I felt the weight of countless women’s hands and voices that once filled this place. With charcoal and water, I began to draw intuitively and then write in Catalan on the walls. Words, fragments, forms — they appeared, dissolved, and reappeared. Each gesture became part of a cycle: writing, erasing, rewriting.

It wasn’t about creating something permanent. It was about inhabiting memory, testing how it resists and disappears, how it lingers in traces. The soundscape that filled the space — voices, birdsong, Catalan words guiding me — was both outside me and inside me. It held me in rhythm, directing my actions and dissolving them again.

What struck me most was how the act of labour — scrubbing, wiping, carrying, repeating — echoed through my own body as I worked. I felt connected to those who once bent over the water here, doing necessary work that was rarely acknowledged. The performance was about us: the communal, the shared, the layered presence of those before and those still to come.

There was no neat ending, no resolution. Just traces left behind on the walls and in the body. A reminder that memory is never fixed — it is marked, unmarked, and always rewritten.

Full video documentation below:

Words written and removed during the performance:

Cos (body)
Records (memories)
Espai (space)
Dones (women)
Força (strength)
Cura (care)
Veu (voice)
Silenci (silence)
Aigua (water)
Comunal (communal)