Juan Pablo Pacheco

Aprendiz de Río (An Apprentice River)

Aprendiz de Río is an audiovisual fable depicting the Manzanares River at three stages of its course: its source, beside the antennae of the Bola del Mundo in the Sierra de Guadarrama; its treatment at La China wastewater treatment plant, and its passage through the neighbourhood allotments of Perales del Río. The project transduces the voices of the river to construct a hydropoetics embedded in its layers of acoustic, electromagnetic, and chemical pollution caused by pharmaceutical waste. The Manzanares encapsulates the tensions between rewilding, technical control, and neighbourhood resistance, inviting viewers to consider what a river might say were we were to listen to it, beyond its value as a resource. The title borrows its title from Quevedo’s description of the Manzanares as a ‘rivulet, an apprentice river’, although in this case it is the artist who becomes a rivulet that also learns from the river.

Bio

Juan Pablo Pacheco (Bogotá, 1991) is an artist, researcher, and educator with a background in film, anthropology, and media arts. His research explores political ecology and technological infrastructures from the perspective of new materialities and poetic imagination. His practice spans writing, sound and video installations, audio walks, guided meditations, edible projects, and participatory pedagogies. In addition to teaching at the Javeriana University and the University of the Andes in Bogotá, the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and Elisava in Madrid, he has curated public programmes at Plataforma Bogotá and Espacio Odeón. His work has been presented at exhibitions and festivals in many countries including Austria, Colombia, Norway, the Netherlands, Chile, the United States, Belgium, Mexico, and Germany, among others.