CHARCO by Pepa Ubera at Spring Health’s empty swimming pool

Friday 28th & Sunday 30th May: 7:30pm – 8:15pm

81 Belsize Park Gardens, NW3 4NJ

CHARCO (Spanish for puddle) is a performative space that explores relationships between the body, technology and ecology, interrogating our connection to the non-human world. The work is set in an imaginary future in which all plant life on earth has died away. Viewers encounter a group of figures exploring new entities, which are formed from the residues of long dormant technological and organic material. Set in a disused swimming pool complex, Charco invites audiences to imagine “Cyborg landscapes’’, expansive spaces in which the moving body seeks out new relationships between infrastructure, ecology, and society.

CHARCO is an episode of a larger project,The Machine of Horizontal Dreams (2023), by Pepa Ubera, a new full-length performance installation that looks at decoding narratives of progress.

For this new iteration of CHARCO, Pepa has been working with the sculptures of Miriam Austin and set design by Leila Arenou. Artists Pepa Ubera and Miriam Austin have been working since 2016 on an ongoing collaborative project that centres around an exploration of sculpture and choreography. They create environments and performances that re-imagine the terrain of the gendered body, mapping out possibilities for and images of intimacy and proposing alternative languages of embodied relationality. Leila Arenou operates between different fields, producing and curating objects, displays, videos, sound pieces, clothing, performances, parties.