Céline Pelcé

A water meeting.
If we consider water as the carrier of plants, minerals, metamorphosis, stories and emotions, how does water we drink connect us to its landscape, and make us a part of it ?
Using the fountain as both a social figure and a vessel for water,  « Streams » is a water meeting orchestrated by Céline Pelcé. During this meeting she invited the audience to gather around the fountain of sura in Tschlin and enter in a gustatory contact with the route of water to provoke an intimate relation between our bodies and the landscape.

Pelcé’s work traces the journey of water and its exchange with different environments while running down the mountain, through the village and further. Investigatin this route, Pelcé went upstream. She located different stages of exchange between the water and the landscape and collected  minerals and plants. She mixed those raw materials into 5 beverages that embodied those stages: The rocky area where snow and rain enter the soil, the source’s mossy surrounding, the pine forest, the meadow plants, and finally the village gardens. These beverages were then served during the water meeting at the fountain to a local audience.

Orchestrating the gathering by conducting specific gestures, unfolding stories and the beverages’ recipes, Pelcé kept filling the glasses and releasing them on the water surface. The glasses navigated with the natural flow of the fountain stream and slowly moved towards the audience.

For Pelcé it is key that the act of drinking water can be an entry, allowing human beings to meet their interdependence with the landscape in motion. Her approach opens also broader, to more playful and poetic streams of associations with water. Water being intertwined with the soil itself is a carrier of emotions. Consequently, the fountain can no longer be seen just as ‘a commodity source of spring water'. Pelcé’s approach identifies the fountain to be a poetical body, as well as an architectural, social and political one.

Minerals and plants used for the gathering in Tschlin, Switzerland in July 2022:
limestone, moss, pine needles, mugwort, hogweed, Laser Siler, Eldferflower and lavender.