CAC x WBM | Lundahl & Seitl: River Biographies

Swedish artist duo Lundahl & Seitl present River Biographies – Huangpu River. Co-produced by the Chronus Art Center (CAC) and the West Bund Museum, this program is a special commission for the “Cultural Researcher” program. The program was initiated by the West Bund Museum with the special support of CHANEL.

From April 28 to May 11, 2025, Lundahl & Seitl undertook a field research project in Shanghai, supported by CAC and the West Bund Museum.The project focuses on Shanghai’s soundscape and the city’s local cultural fabric, taking the Huangpu River — Shanghai’s “mother river” — as its point of departure. By exploring sound as a way of listening to the river, the artists seek to rediscover its multifaceted presence.

For over two decades, Lundahl & Seitl’s research-based practice has revolved around the human body as a medium, exploring its entanglement with landscapes, ecosystems, and technologies of perception. River Biographies is a perennial, evolving art project shaped by rivers and people who live alongside them. It listens, adapts and learns. Each iteration responds to the ecological, emotional, and cultural landscapes of a particular river and its surrounding communities. Huangpu, Indus, Ruhr, Bosphorus.The rivers’ own memory carries personal, geological, chemical, and industrial histories. Buried rivers, lost species, disturbed climates. The rivers in the artwork are part of the earth’s body, silenced by what we can no longer bear: grief, shame, loss, longing, sacredness.

With River Biographies – Huangpu River at Westbund, participants are invited to enter dialogue with water—as memory, as witness, as force—and parts of themselves shaped by its flow. This is a relational space where things of the world remain unseen until met within the body.

The project unfolds as a poetic topology of bodies, movement, emotions, stones, tears, water and voices, a process where Shanghai meet riverine communities across the world: the Indus — revered yet polluted; the Ruhr — once straightened, now slowly rewilding; the dammed rivers of northern Sweden, where trapped water generates energy displaced elsewhere. Each current carries both harm and renewal, reminding us that what is buried or silenced may also be restored.

Together, these global cycles of water form a score, a choreography of movement and relation; asking how grief can be transformed into care, and how waters, once controlled or abandoned, might be returned to flow.

River Biographies takes two interwoven forms:

1. Living Archive

— a continuous environment of mist, smell, sound, stones and vibration, continuously shifting with the tides, echoing within the memory of the rivers of the world. Songs drift in and out, carried on sub-bass vibrations and

hyper-directional loudspeakers. Here, sound does not diffuse into the room but travels like a tight beam, landing directly on the listener’s body — as if the voice originates from with and within them. The tides bring a shift in the mists: smell particles — the river’s memory made molecular — evoke geological, chemical, and industrial histories. Songs drift in and out, sculpted into air as fragile tides.

2. Embodiment Sessions

Groups of twenty participants surrender their autonomy to the collective expression of rivers. To embody the river is not something one observes – it is something one undergoes. In each session, they are divided into two roles: stones and water. The stones remain still while the water moves among them, simulating the current’s approach, pressure, and convergence. Participants receive wireless headphones and goggles that obscure sight and turn the gaze inward. Smell and touch are the work’s first language – a language that bypasses vision and logic, touches memory, and opens the body to another kind of knowing. Within this sensory environment,participants are guided by voices set into motion through hand-to-hand intra-action.

How to Experience the Embodiment Session of River Biographies (Free entry)

Reservations must be made via the “LIFE WESTBUND” mini program on WeChat. During live performances, non-participating visitors are welcome to enter the gallery but remain outside the performance area. The embodiment session is limited to 20 participants per session and lasts around 45 minutes. Before each session, participants receive a short introduction and are provided with headphones. Scan the QR code below, using WeChat, to register (free entry):