Intimate Diary of a Residency by the Riachuelo
Mover La Lengua, May 2026
Saturday, May 2 — Day 1
Yesterday was Workers’ Day. It sounds strange, but even among some of my friends, it was hard to explain that art is work. Maybe all that struggle sometimes pays off. Today we started a residency where we are actually being paid to create.
A guy opened the door for us. If he were an animal, he’d be a horse. Because of his elegance.
Our space is upstairs, and from the window you can see the river. There were rugs on the floor — warm objects, with a grandmother-like texture — surrounded by grey and concrete.
The first thing we needed was to put the body into action. To dress the space with Mover La Lengua. To empty the room of meaning and fill it with our own things. Like arriving at a vacation house. I move the furniture around, arrange my clothes and objects in my own rhythm, the way I like. The intention is always the same: to make the space feel ours, even if only for a while.
In the afternoon, there was a concert in the garden. Carla’s gaze is so intense. I don’t think being an actress is easy. At least not being a good one. Her presence was incredible.
She read a poem by Perlongher that we had already used in a Mover La Lengua video. A video we watched over and over again. Everything connects somehow.
Walking through La Boca felt both touristy and deeply familiar.
The Peruvian restaurant wasn’t amazing, but the paintings were beautiful. So was the waitress. The lemonade was excellent.
Things:
Motherhood, like art, is also unpaid labor. Imagine being both a mother and an artist. Pffff.
Sixty-six percent of fathers do not pay child support. Imagine how much care work they take on. Sixty-six percent. The majority.
Justice stays silent.
Wednesday, May 6 — Day 2
It took me two hours to get from Florida to La Boca. Half the time it takes to get to the beach. Three times longer than going to the country house in Del Viso. Twice what Google Maps said.
Martina had already prepared the room with the speaker, the mixer, the computer. More and more, the room is beginning to look like a work. Today we were very mental, too.
We had an online meeting with Mariana. She asked us: “Can you help me help you?”
“What’s the difference between a performance and a workshop?”
While eating a chicken pie that Martu had gone out to buy — taking dozens of pictures on the way because, she says, once a subject gets inside your head, it starts appearing everywhere outside too.
When you’re having a good time, time slips away like water through a drain. I prefer to think that this water is becoming juice. A tiny sea to bathe in when it gets hot.
The light changed colors many times. Two French visitors came by. We built scenes. Collected statistics. Read Mariano Blatt. And wrote a poem that we recorded forever.
I took the bus back home to see if it would be faster than the train.
The driver was a woman.
Thursday, May 7 — Day 3
This time I arrived first. I opened my computer and started writing desperately, as if time were running out — which it is.
I wanted to make mate, but all I could do was write.
Today finally felt like autumn. We had polenta for lunch and talked with Nazareno, the artist working downstairs. We said arriving at the space had felt like standing in front of a giant blank page. We also talked about research, and how research in other fields is paid work — badly paid these days, but still paid.
To fight the vertigo, today we worked with the body. When I start moving, sometimes I begin yawning nonstop. Nobody really knows why humans yawn. Google says it cools the brain.
We created a choreography, and at one point we were so immersed in it that a whole group of people entered the room without us noticing. Iña was among them. So good to see him. They are the next ones to inhabit this space. We’re leaving it warm for them.
We also searched for statistics.
Eighty-two percent of women have had to pause or give up their professional careers after becoming mothers.
Bye.
Day 4 — May 10
I feel like the third-world version of Samanta Schweblin. We are being paid to create, and for us that is something completely new, especially in this country. Usually — if we’re lucky — we get paid for delivering something finished. For the final product.
But this moment matters so much too. None of the final work would exist without all those unpaid hours poured into the process. Art and culture wouldn’t exist without them.
Especially for women. Especially for mothers.
This residency is the meta-work itself. Because the performance will talk precisely about this: how to be a mother and an artist at the same time. How to create spaces in order to create. Without guilt. To carve out physical and psychic space. A room of one’s own, real or symbolic. To have others holding things together.
In a world where productivity is everything, we barely even have time to read. We work multiple jobs at once. Culture is no longer valued by the current political climate. Women still carry most domestic labor and care work — children, mothers, other relatives, mothers-in-law, partners.
Using time to create without guilt, and without being paid for it — because creation is production too.
The residency goes beyond this room and this schedule. We enter a “residency state.” We listen to podcasts, read articles and poems, observe the street differently. We are completely crossed by the subject. Because art cannot be separated from life itself. Just like love.
Day 5 — May 6
It’s sunny and smells like Sunday. People walk slowly through the neighborhood, without urgency. A sign says: “Welcome to the Republic of La Boca.”
An older man comes to visit us with his granddaughter, who has just arrived in Buenos Aires to study. He’s a photographer, and for reasons we never fully understand, he speaks to us in English and German, even though he’s Argentine and lives here.
I ask him whether becoming a father changed anything about the way he thinks about art, time, or life in general. He says no. Not at all. He shakes his head firmly, leaving no room for follow-up questions.
Later in the afternoon, we finally began organizing ourselves, as if we had identified the puzzle pieces. Now we have to assemble them. A skeleton without life yet.
We work with the body, test scenes. I climb inside a transparent cube. I dance, I recite. I reciteanddance.
We leave covered in dust. Full of doubts and a few certainties. We come across the light tubes that will become part of the set. If you speak, one lights up. Depending on the word, another one turns on. They can also be programmed to react to the tone of your voice.
We play like children at recess when someone says: “Come on, let’s…”
Day 6 — May 13
Today some students from UNA came by. I felt nostalgic for that period of pure curiosity. Mine never really disappeared, but back then the world made me thirsty.
We opened a discussion about desire.
Can desire exist outside context? Without another person?
NOTES
fear of losing one’s own life
how discourse changes depending on the generation — before, “all women had children”
which questions remain the same and which don’t
the creativity of a pregnant body
is it always with another person?
can I take responsibility for this?
do men talk about these things?
age — are bodies more or less available?
fertility
before there was a certain social order. now it broke apart
where does desire fit in? I’m tired of questions
can desire be built alone or only with others?
the couple as the first cell of community
the future
can I be a mother and an artist? when do I rehearse?
who will take care of you when you grow old?
Day 7 — May 14
I write less and less. We’ve started working with the body more intensely, and that’s the only thing that quiets my mind. So I’ve been away from my brain and away from words.
We are practicing a choreography made of words.
Day 8 — May 16Today we received Mariana García Guerreiro.
Survey. At this link, you can complete a survey related to the theme of the project that Mover La Lengua is currently developing at PROA21.