Nadando

The Balsemão Dam near Lamego, Portugal, is operated by The China Three Gorges Corporation. This company was created to fulfill what Mao Zedong has been envisioning in his poem 'Swimming' from 1956: to build a dam over the Yangtse-river.

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The task was completed in 2012. Today, the China Three Gorges Corporation is one of the world's largest energy companies operating worldwide.
The Balsemão dam does thus not only represent one of the major infrastructure projects in this rural landscape but is also a boundary object, that serves as a transition between nature and economy and between the communist myth and a capitalist global society.
How does the myth of 'conquering nature' lives on in the economic reality of contemporary society? How are the Chines past and the Portuguese present, poetic fiction and the reality of a flowing ecosystem intertwined?

Based on the poem "Swimming" by Mao Zedong. Shot at the Balsemão Dam near Lamego, Portugal.
Created in the frame of: VOUGASCAPES #4 - International Sound Art & Social Research Residency.