CHRISTINA CATANESE

The Two Mile Reservoir is a formerly dammed area of the Santa Fe River that once supplied the city of Santa Fe with its drinking water. After two larger reservoirs were built upstream, the dam was removed in the 1990s and the river has since been slowly restored to a more natural state. However, traces of the area’s dammed history are still visible in the hydrologic functioning, landscape formations, and plant and animal communities. Like many rivers in northern New Mexico, it is a landscape that is not entirely man-made and not entirely natural.

This silent video and the choreography it documents were developed at the Santa Fe Art Institute was part of a Water Rights cohort in 2017. During this artist residency, Catanese created new site-responsive choreography and visual artwork for the Rio Grande watershed.  More examples of this work are here.