Apneas and Other Grammars

Apneas and Other Grammars emerges from an encounter between collective swimming practice, deep-sea research and the figure of the mermaid. The video explores how embodied knowledge, memory and imagination can shape new ways of relating to environments that remain largely unknown.

The work is developed through a collaborative swimming practice with a group of elderly swimmers from Club Natació Atlètic-Barceloneta. Their long-term relationship with swimming becomes a living archive of bodily memories, rhythms and sensations accumulated through decades of movement in water. Moving away from swimming as a technical discipline, the practice unfolds through immersion, breath, synchrony and collective perception, creating a poetic grammar where bodies learn from water through repetition, attention and shared experience.

The pool becomes a site of experimentation and transmission: a space where gestures, breathing patterns and movements can evoke other aquatic environments and forms of relation. Rather than recreating the seabed, the video explores how underwater experiences can emerge through the body, through imagination and through the traces that remain within it.

The figure of the mermaid enters the work not as a fixed mythological character, but as a fluid presence that has continuously transformed across cultures and histories. Existing through multiple forms and interpretations, the mermaid opens a space for thinking about hybridity, metamorphosis and the permeability between bodies, environments and ways of knowing.

The project is made possible through the collaboration between the artist and Club Natació Atlètic-Barceloneta, Institut de Ciències del Mar CSIC, and funded thanks to Barcelona Crea, Homesession and the SAC-FiC Programm at Sant Andreu Contemporani / Fabra i Coats.

In collaboration with video editor Ana de Mier y Ortuño.

Single-channel video, 4K, sound, 13 min, 2026