Lundahl & Seitl, River Biographies

River Biographies centres around the concept of orphaned nature — waterways that have been buried, redirected, culverted, or otherwise severed from their ecological function due to urban development.

At Liljevalchs, the exhibition format is reimagined as a living environmental process — a porous system of inflow and outflow, in which visitors become part of a breathing interconnected ecosystem, shaped and moved by the vibrant matter that passes through them and the art space.

River Biographies is presented as a score unfolding in two modes: Living Archive and Embodiment.

Liljevalchs’ Sculpture Hall breathes, carries and connects scent, sound, light and vibrations like organs in a circulatory system for feelings, memory and matter. Hyper-directional speakers are used to create extreme intimacy – where the sound is not diffused in the room, but travels like a thin beam and emerge, resonating with the visitor’s body, in the encounter. In the Living Archive, the gallery space breathes in subtle tidal rhythms. A mist rises and dissolves. Choral songs flow into the memory and atmosphere of the room. As the weather in the archive shifts, haze and light projections ripple across the visitors’ silhouettes, like water on skin. Sub-bass vibrations resonate through the floor and walls, while smell particles — the river's memory — evoke their geological, chemical, and industrial histories.

What if the rivers we’ve buried, the species we’ve lost and the climate we’ve destabilized aren’t just outer phenomena, but symptoms of displaced parts of our own inner world?

Embodying the river isn’t something to observe – it’s something to experience.
Groups of up to 40 people receive wireless headphones and sightless goggles and turn the gaze inwards. Smell and touch become the first language of the work – bypassing sight and logic, touch the memory and open up the body to another consciousness. The participants are guided by voices set into motion through hand-to-hand interactions.

We pull, drag and shape each other – sometimes in resistance, sometimes in parallel movements – until everything stops. Our bodies create valleys and furrows, reshape the landscape with new voices. Our hands shift between care and control. It’s frightening to realize how many guises they can take, the farmers hand that redirects the flow from the field, the industrialist’s hand that coerces the movement into straight lines. We are all of this – and none of it – at the same time.  

Like water and stone, we shape our surroundings, and the surroundings shape us back. Landmass rises underneath our feet, mountains are withered down to plains – we are geology in motion. The permanence of the landscape is an illusion, created by short life-spans. We hear the rise and fall of civilization like sudden sound pulses. Some hands tame and constrain us. Others set us free. Possessed by the stone within I move – carried by forces not entirely my own.

A mutual trust, a balance between differences, softens the will to control and allows the river to express itself freely through the still choreography of the bodies. Matter, energy and movement mirror the elemental forces at play — how earth obstructs, how water yields, how bones remember resistance. Gradually, the group begins to move less as individuals and more as one body. This process is not about becoming something else, but about remembering what is already there: that we are water and stone, being reconfigured as a river. We are not in the nature – the nature is within us.

River Biographies is developed as a co-production between Liljevalchs konsthall and West Bund Museum in collaboration with Chronus Art Centre, Shanghai (CN) and Riksteatern (SE). Research partner: Southbank Centre, London (UK). The project has been realized with financial support from IASPIS – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, as well as the Swedish Arts Council.

Experience the Archive Cycle and Embodiment in River Biographies

More information on how to book a spot will be available closer to the opening of the exhibition.