The birth of otherness. Towards a littoralisation1 of borders
The function of the beautiful is precisely to indicate to us the place of the human being’s relationship with their own death, and to indicate it to us only in a dazzlement2.
—Jacques Lacan
River-body that is born, grows, dies and is born again, and in your eternal return, constant impermanence.
The sound of the cuckoo begins to establish another measurement of time; black-torsoed slugs silence the speed of a train that sharpens us towards an immediacy banished from the species. We reach the river’s birth with the memory of other tributaries, with sediments of walked projects, with the weight of dreams already dreamed, with open wars and waged battles that pulse with memory the lands of this river.
To walk in times of urgency, to resist new stretches, to tread with the fragility of the errant bodies that carry uncertainty in their step; all of this happens at the Pico Tres Mares. All of it precedes us and makes us present, opens pores in us that presage new senses on this journey that follows the thread of the water, barely perceptible beneath the snow.
The body of the river springs forth newly born, breaks from the earth-matrix, and in that same act death already hovers, unfolding the certainty of its finitude, which will be oceanic-body. The body of the river will need 80 days to grow, to develop, to be a mouth and to become Mediterranean. We listen to its heartbeats, just surfaced in the mountain, and our perception sharpens. As if it were the birth of a divinity, we seek its origins, we detail its descendances. In sacred silence we attend its departure, while the artist records its warbles and we gather stones to raise a small altar where we will place the vessel that will carry a sample of this origin, there in its finitude.
In the river’s delivery no banks are sighted; its contour, still unestablished, speaks of a corporeality without rivalries. In the bowels of the mountain, the creaking of the earth, the snow and the hail awaken another thickness of time and space. The stillness that sets its rhythm goes marking an ambulant-body that keeps time with, rocks and is rocked by that of the newly born/appeared river. We attend with a disconcerted body that goes leaving behind the machinic —progress is perceived as another—; we begin to shed worn-out signifiers.
The thread of water slides us towards Fontibre. In the imperceptible zigzag of its course we hear the manufacturing hands of Felipe, which show how from the same steel come sculptures and rifles, nuts and tanks, and how a single factory housed cooperativist employees who fought for their rights until it gradually scattered, softening its consistency. His hands make the Ebro speak of that force; his body, forged of struggles, twists the memory of the same river that served to give work, to model a territory beside the water, to create objects for wars and beautiful pieces for works that lighten us of all destruction.
Our body goes re-signifying itself on the path, the flesh goes acquiring a state stripped of the letter, as if it were born with the very birth of the river, without signifiers, with footsteps that bite the contour of a path that sounds like pure perception. Despite the hail, the rain and the feet that sink into the mud, there is the jubilation of one who begins to walk through the existence of the edges that are not yet banks, along an ancestral path where men and women walked beside the water turned deity. At the source everything mirrors itself; that zigzagging thread, the Híjar —son and father at the same time—, reappears in the place that officially names it. There the margins are fragilely installed, right and left, banks that discover the other across the way; to face the other with the tension of that discovery.
To draw near the shore, to discover that the margin contains the diverse and, in that discovery, to perceive the birth of the otherness that is not a rival. Upon this tension we lay coordinates, and psychoanalysis appears as a living creature that unfolds along the route, art as a creature of resistance that never ceases to insist.
I watch Marco collect water from the thread that forms a contour and bodies-forth the river, just infans. There we begin to perceive the margins and the river as border, its edges that evidence or render invisible what lies on the other side and that illuminate the vital conflict that unveils —and embodies— the different.
That pure perception that remains lost beneath the mantle of the signifier at all the beginnings of human life reappears in the territories of the infant-river. We do not only look with our eyes; we look with the whole body, our skin becomes a receptacle of the path and its margins.
We follow the passing of the black, yellow-bellied slugs that go leaving their trail with their temporal hands, bodies–devices that go deposing the power of the machine: progress becomes another.
At Arroyo a first fragmentation occurs, the first dam that stops the water, like the lives of those who opposed Francoism and who are liberated by the voice of David, who uninstalls oblivion.
The river is a constant that bodies-forth our species.
Reflection of those who play it, inhabit it, celebrate it, fragment it.
Entrambasaguas, Reinosa, Arroyo, Montes Claros, Polientes, Valdivielso.
We walk with the water insinuated into our folds, with rusted joints, fogged glasses, soaked gaze. The clattering of the storks spells out each entrance and each exit of depopulated or barely inhabited lands, impregnating our passages with changing signs: hospitality, hostility, right bank, left bank. The border-river goes widening.
The cycle of birth and death happens to us each day. In each segment of route, our body, an archive of kilometres, perishes and dawns with each fall of night and each daybreak. Our body becomes meander, curves, folds, stands erect, ails, contours itself with the living movements of the river. We are transitory bodies, transtemporal, transterritorial passers-by.
Sonorous clouds of birds go entering our skins, our gills, our wings. The reflection of the forest in the Ebro, the Ebro reflected in the forests; an orchid in the shape of a bumblebee speaks to us of its mimetic pollination; a cicada undresses and is reborn in the artist’s tent.
The territories go being archived in the body, the river goes being archived in our bodies. Gone river-inwards, gone river-outwards, we suffer the vital irrigations of the river-territory. Acts of the body in movement, in interrelation with the poetics of nature, leave their record. A vital body in action that, advancing with the river, goes gestating a new connection with its own knowledge and with the knowledges of the territory.
Washerwomen, women farmers, herders of Tudanca cows, fishermen, artisans of the voice, keepers of dialects, singers of the river, safeguarders of maternal voices.
Everything is new, says the artist’s voice, everything is a new gaze, everything is a finding in the archive of the path. In the navel of time, the ungraspable goes embodying itself, progress is left behind, gone into a future that is past and that with each step becomes future.
The Ebro grows and, in its adolescent widenings, transforming its flow from infant to exultant-divinity, its sound deafens our steps, which adhere to the noise of experience. Its body becomes wrapping.
We are two serpents skirting the matter-river.
We observe the fragmentations that keep happening. We too are fragmented. The state of the river affects us, the affected territory crosses through us as living organisms in coexistence with the multiple species. Our step halts, becomes heavy. Windmills, fields of solar panels, seas of steel that flood the path become incorporated into the body and determine it. We never cease to feel the urgency of the world in each gait.
With what dreams will we reach the source? What dreams will be dreamed there in death? What body will remain inscribed in us?
The artist’s stroke skirts the walked reality with brushstrokes, gathers the throbbing matter at the margins, safeguards the silence, captures sonorities. He sews in layers what is seen and heard in the stretches of each phase of the territory-river. The voice of the river is captured in its different stages, on its surfaces, in its depths.
gorges of the Horadada
cave-listening,
weirs that form a barrier.
Halting of the journey.
Blackout,
the fracture of the dream
a break through which another reality slips,
deserted silence, awake silence.
A stumble, the routes bifurcate,
broken paths, wanderings of the body,
channel of happenings, Ebro and Suquía.
In the Delta, childhood represented by a group of boys and girls receives the artist; in jubilant cyclicity, they draw near to give support to the last stretch. Heading towards the sea, the arrival at the Mediterranean opens an ocean of silence. The death of the river-body merges between two seas.
While the artist accompanies the river to its end, in Argentina —a banzeiro3 crossed— I accompany my mother to flow out into her sea. We attend (from our desolate and nameless smallness) the final embodiment of this symbiosis (dialogue, metaphor, correspondence, synchronicity) between the human-body and the river-body.
What body remains inscribed? A river-body in full work of mourning, that mourns its mouth, that is constituted of affective, relational, political substrata. A river-body that speaks with a new memory and is capable of being read from a new inscription. A unified river-body that, conscious of its corporeality, knotting its fragments, cannot cease to be represented in its totality. A river-body that is born, spends its infancy in Cantabrian lands, goes changing languages —Castilian-Basque-Catalan, according to its voice, it serpentines—, becomes border and road of territory to end its life in Catalonia.
A unified body in which it would be possible to littoralise the rivalries and transform the edges into opportunities for new bridges.
To Norma Cabrera,
little-mother-river,
who, fearing her mouth,
became sea.
23-10-1951 / 08-07-2025
Celeste Reyna (1977, Córdoba, Argentina) is a psychoanalyst and teacher. She has worked in the public and private spheres for twenty years. Her interest and work focus on collective projects related to access to psychoanalysis for all and the creation of devices where listening, the word and artistic tools promote the elaboration of distress. In recent years, out of the need to resort to subjectivising community practices, she has worked and works on different artistic projects in which she interweaves art and psychoanalysis.
Text written for the catalogue of the exhibition «Cos d’Ebre», produced by Lo Pati, Centre d’Art Terres de l’Ebre.
Other texts from the same catalogue:
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Littoral: edge between two distinct fields, in which the passage from one side to the other does not allow a turning back. ⤶
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Jacques Lacan, El seminario, libro 7: La ética del psicoanálisis, 1959–1960 (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1988), 352. ⤶
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«The inhabitants of the Xingu call banzeiro the zone where the river grows wild, through which, with luck, one can cross to the other side; if not, one cannot. It is a dangerous “point” between the place one comes from and the place one wants to go. Whoever rows waits for the banzeiro to withdraw its claws or to calm down. And keeps silent because suddenly the boat may capsize or end up dragged downstream. Keeps silent so as not to awaken the fury of the river. Banzeiro has no synonyms. Nor translation. Banzeiro is what it is. And it is where it is.» —Eliane Brum, Banzeiro Òkòtó: La Amazonia centro del mundo (Barcelona: Lumen, 2023), 27–28. ⤶