Tania Candiani

The video, recorded during a stay at the Casa Wabi Foundation in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, in 2017, recovers and reinterprets a rite of African origin: The Water Drum, one of the most interesting symbolic manifestations among the Bantu and Baka hunter-gatherers of Central Africa, in which women and girls, enter the river and with the water up to their waists hit the surface with their hands, thus awakening the spirit of the forest to ask it to protect their men.

The women of Tacarigüita, a town located in the Barlovento region of the state of Miranda in Venezuela, inherited from their African ancestors this tradition that is maintained to this day, although it has lost its ritual character; it originated, most certainly, as a game, when the slaves went to wash the clothes of their masters and percussed the waters creating different sequences and timbres in group.

The rite is also found in Gaua, one of the islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, where there is a traditional dance called “Water music” transmitted from mothers to daughters, which consists of beating on the water of the sea.