Ebro Community Archive
2025
Ebro Community Archive is a collective sound project born within the framework of Marco Noris’s exhibition Body Ebro (Cos d’Ebre) at Lo Pati (Centre d’Art de les Terres de l’Ebre). The archive gathers short recordings made by citizens who share memories, experiences, anecdotes, or words addressed to the river, weaving a choral and affective narrative of the territory. The result is a living testimony of the cultural and symbolic relationship with the Ebro, activating collective memory, emotion, and listening. The archive is available online.
Coordination and mediation: Gessamí Olesa (Lo Pati) and Celeste Reyna
Related project
Texts and paratexts (1)
Within the framework of the exhibition Body Ebro (Cos d’Ebre) at Lo Pati (Amposta), a collective archive of voices is activated around the Ebro river: memories, experiences, anecdotes, and words dedicated to the river.
The device is conceived as an invitation to reread the territory through listening: a constellation of affective, cultural, and symbolic relationships with the river.
The Ebro Community Archive is now available online
Lo Pati · Ebro Community Archive:
The voices that inhabit the Ebro river, those who have walked it, loved it, lived it, or thought it, are now part of a collective sound archive accessible online. The Ebro Community Archive brings together the recordings made by citizens within the context of the exhibition Body Ebro (Cos d’Ebre), by artist Marco Noris, presented at Lo Pati, Centre d’Art de les Terres de l’Ebre, during the last quarter of 2025.
The project emerged as a mediation action promoted by Lo Pati, coordinated by artist and mediator Gessamí Olesa and with the collaboration of psychoanalyst Celeste Reyna. The call invited people to record an audio of up to one minute to share a memory, an experience, an anecdote, or a few words addressed to the river. An open invitation to reread the territory by listening to it through the voice, from an intimate, emotional, and collective perspective.
The result is a sound conglomerate that works as a shared testimony of the cultural, symbolic, and affective relationship the territory holds with its river. A corpus of voices and sounds that brings forth memories, questions, and concerns, and proposes a new way of approaching the Ebro: not only as landscape or infrastructure, but as a living and shared body.
As Celeste Reyna notes, “the voices of the beings who inhabit the Ebro produce sound records from the very birth of the river; an archive of reminiscences, words, and stories that sediment communally until they reach its mouth, the Mediterranean.” Each fragment collected thus inscribes itself in a choral narrative that transcends time and leaves sound traces along the river’s course.
The Ebro Community Archive dialogues directly with the artistic project Body Ebro (Cos d’Ebre), which begins with the journey on foot that Marco Noris and Celeste Reyna undertook between April and July 2025: more than eighty days and nearly 1,200 kilometres following the river from its source in Fontibre (Cantabria) to its mouth in the Ebro delta. This physical and symbolic experience turns walking into an artistic practice and research tool, activating a reading of the territory “in real time” that engages with geography, history, and the climate emergency.
From this encounter between art, mediation, and citizen participation sprouts a living archive, open and constantly resonant, that addresses the listener directly. What would you say to the river? What ties you to it? What do you share with it today? Questions that bind us and place us before a being that accumulates centuries of history and experience. “The magma of enunciations about this river-body, river-experience, river-history has been recorded with voices that come alive when listened to. Each voice, from each walked fragment, leaves its sound trace beyond any temporality,” concludes Reyna.
Coordination and mediation
- Artistic coordination / mediation: Gessamí Olesa (Lo Pati)
- Coordination / accompaniment: Celeste Reyna
Activation and presentation
The archive was activated between October and November 2025, with a public call for recordings (up to 1 minute) and a presentation linked to the closing of the exhibition.
Body Ebro, an uproar that grows (closing event)
Closing event and archive presentation (Lo Pati, Amposta, 15.11.2025).
