AQUA ET TEMPUS or the archaeology of anticipation
Rivers exemplify one of the great paradoxes of our relationship with nature. We know they are living systems, yet we have learnt to view them as resources that can be managed. It is within this conflicted reality that much of Àlvar Calvet’s work unfolds.
In Aqua et Tempus, these concerns converge around the River Aniene. The exhibition showcases the work undertaken during Calvet’s residency in Lazio from 2024 to 2025 and builds on Seven Places, Seven Souls and The Seven Souls of the Aniene. The Aniene, a tributary of the Tiber, flows through a region containing numerous archaeological remains and hydraulic systems. Calvet approaches it as if trying to read a landscape that has been written and rewritten countless times.
Archaeology plays a central role. Heads, hearts, oil lamps shaped like river trout, banners, sediment coins and small water shrines seem displaced from their time. Calvet is drawn to the ambiguity of the objects. They are both remnants of what has gone before and harbingers of a relationship with water that we cannot yet imagine.
The pieces derive from experiences along the Aniene, from encounters with people connected to the river and from actions that form a secular liturgy. Walking, offering and burying are the three stages of The Seven Souls of the Aniene procession. Walking adjusts the body to a different scale; offering establishes a relationship not based on possession; burying introduces a gesture contrary to extraction.
The ritual is not a romantic evocation of nature, but a means of introducing a different way of paying attention. The objects give form to what lies beyond the languages of management, such as the experience of a place or the disappearance of a species. The trout-shaped lamp refers to a species that has disappeared from the Aniene; the seven water shrines relate to seven specific points along the river and the tensions inherent in each. One of these shrines has already formed part of a procession and a burial; the other six, prepared for future processions and burials, remain as forms of anticipation. The coins made from sediment, meanwhile, raise a question about value.
Water cannot be separated from geopolitics. Its flow, distribution and retention determine relationships between territories and communities. The river brings present-day conflicts to light: water as a common asset and an economic resource, and the desire to control its cycles.
In Seven Places, Seven Souls Calvet is led, with his eyes covered, by seven people to different sites along the Aniene. Blindness forces him to listen and accept the guidance of people who know and look after the river. Not being able to see helps him notice things that would otherwise escape him.
Somewhere between archaeology and anticipation, between memory and preservation, the objects in Aqua et Tempus remain as time capsules; they conserve the memory of what has already passed and keep the possibility of what is yet to come alive. The issue is not only what we have lost, but what we are still able to preserve.