UP THE CREEK-ARTIST IN RESIDENCY-ASTRID MENDEZ

Astrid is a Gadubanud-based multidisciplinary practitioner working across visual arts, design, puppetry and socially engaged practices. Born in Latin America and shaped by her experience as a migrant, her work is rooted in connection, care and deep attentiveness to place, memory and collective experience. Her artistic approach creates spaces where presence, dialogue and reciprocity can emerge.

Current of Connection

Currents of Connection is a journey into liquid weaving - each paddle stroke a thread, each participant a knot in a larger relational web. As the group moves with the water, they are invited to listen deeply, noticing rhythms, silences, memories and stories carried by the Dhungala. Along the way, participants may begin to ‘collect’ sound knots or gestures tied to memory and place, gradually connecting them into one shared body of experience.

The paddling becomes a moving meditation, an embodied practice of presence and relation. Space will be held for both personal reflection and collective ‘weaving’, grounding in the waters that flow through both the land and each individual’s body-territory.

Thread to Carry Forward

Through this liquid weaving journey, participants will be invited to enter a space of slowness, full- body listening and attunement to the rhythms of the water and their own internal tides. The act of paddling becomes a moving meditation, each stroke gently untying knots of disconnection, offering space to rethread a sense of presence and belonging. This embodied encounter with place encourages deeper sensitivity to our own sentience and the subtle layers of perception often left dormant in fast-paced life.

Creatively, the experience opens new pathways of seeing and sensing, offering spontaneous and process-based opportunities to co-create with water, gesture and memory. Participants will contribute to a collectively formed knotted piece, a ritualised and symbolic container for the journey’s insights. The act of making becomes not a performance but an extension of presence -an unseen weaving that threads together body, land, spirit and story.

Ecologically and socially, this journey grounds environmental care in embodied empathy. What our bodies can feel, they can begin to understand. We will explore the body’s capacity to be affected; to feel, respond and connect with the more-than-human world. Drawing from ancient cosmologies, we will approach water not as a resource, but as a relative, a living being with whom we share kinship.

Together, we might ask: What kind of relationship do we want to weave with the waters that sustain us? What threads of care are we willing to carry forward?

Supported Place

We understand that life is tough for some at the moment and want to ensure that the trip is accessible for a wide range of participants. There is a fund to support those affected by cost of living pressures that would otherwise miss out. We have a small amount of fully and partially funded places.

Application for Supported Place

If you are financially going well, contributions to the fund can be made.

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About the Artist

Her practice is strongly influenced by her involvement in the Latin American ecofeminist collective Colectiva Abya Yala, with whom she co-developed the Situated Weaving Methodology -a transdisciplinary framework that uses weaving not only as a physical gesture but also as a symbolic, process-based approach to connection. In this context, weaving can take many forms: the tying of simple knots, the layering of stories or the interlacing of voices, memories and movements. It becomes a way to explore shared knowledge, presence and relation to land-body -a practice that values process, place and reciprocity over polished outcomes.

In addition to her collective work, she brings a unique blend of individual strengths: a background in design, a deep engagement with the anthropology of arts and over 18 years of experience in the visual and performing arts. She has developed a versatile and responsive artistic language that moves fluidly between mediums and communities, adapting to each project’s needs with care and curiosity.

She has also been a dedicated practitioner of meditation and yoga for over two decades. These embodied practices continue to shape her capacity to hold space -centring states of being over doing- and to create conditions where people feel safe and inspired to reconnect with themselves, others and the natural world.