ALLUVIONS
Cléménce Vazard
Gallery Anne Clergue, Arles
Arroyo
Arroyo is an artistic and textile project developed in 2025, consisting of twenty works that trace the course of the Río Bravo, a 3,000-kilometer river marking the border between Mexico and the United States. Using jacquard weaving, embroidery, and natural dyeing, this series examines watersheds as living, political, and sensitive territories, exposing the relationships of interdependence between humans and non-humans.
The Río Bravo has been deeply altered by a century and a half of infrastructure development, industrial pollution, and water diversion, to the point where it no longer reached the ocean by the early 2000s. In Arroyo, each work represents an attempt at reconnection: symbolically repairing what has been severed, making the territory’s water memory visible, and examining our extractive relationship with rivers.
The series draws a parallel between river topography and the human circulatory system. The river functions as an artery, a vital network necessary for life. Through embroidery, weaving, and dyeing, I connect cartography, body, and landscape, turning textiles into a medium for care and repair.
« San Lorenzo » and « La Chulita, » two works presented as wall hangings, signal a shift in the project: moving beyond repair to allowing the river to exist without human intervention. Color spills across the surface like flooding water, expressing the regenerative capacity of living systems when left unconstrained.
