Erzë Dinarama
Drumming for Love

An installation commissioned by OGR Torino within the framework of STARTS4WATER II
Curated by Iacopo Prinetti

Saturday, November 1, 2025 – Sunday, November 2, 2025
H 10 – 20
Binario 3 | OGR Torino
Friday, October 31, 2025 – Professional Day

Free admission

 

On November 1 and 2, 2025, from 10 AM to 8 PM visitors will be able to freely explore Drumming for Love, the installation by Erzë Dinarama presented at Binario 3 of OGR Torino, created as the culmination of the artist’s residency at OGR Torino.

Erzë Dinarama’s STARTS4Water II residency at OGR, part of the European Union program, investigates the Po River basin through multiple entangled actors -human, non-human, and technological - meeting at the threshold of the “ecological minimum.” Working alongside territorial actors such as Rete Fiumi, an interregional network for river protection, associations such as VisoaViso and Orti Generali, research centres including Alpstream (University of Turin) and Fondazione Santagata, and various local activists, Dinarama seeks to de-blackbox the politics of the river’s water. The absence of water does not merely signify scarcity; it reorganises relationships between species, infrastructures, and human decisions.

The installation at OGR Torino unfolds as a two-part exploration: first as an analytical excavation, then as a collective act of attunement. The first act, a video installation, traces the multiple temporalities embedded in the Deflusso Minimo Vitale. Functioning like a geological section, it reveals how processes such as evapotranspiration, fish relocation, geological modelling, drought prediction, and legal regulation accumulate and intersect. This exposes the posthuman condition of the governance of drought, where biological, legal, and computational timescales converge. This cartography of interdependence continually rewrites itself, revealing the fragility of the systems on which we depend.

In the second act, Drumming for Love takes the shape of a counterdevice. A reinterpretation of the mesocosm – an apparatus reproducing riverine conditions – here transformed into a space of shared perception and attunement. It stages conversations between pairs of aquatic insects: dialogues conducted in the unique “stream language,” the love language of a specific river, each with its own syntax of currents and vibrations. Drumming on metal tanks, the installation translates the substrate-born vibrations imperceptible to humans (20Hz) through which the insects communicate. These almost invisible species act as living sensors, registering subtle shifts in flow, temperature, and oxygen. Their fragility is evidence; their thresholds of survival coincide with the limits of policy, data, and law.

Paying attention to small, uncharismatic, and usually absent species from the public imagination means more than just studying their biology: it becomes an act of acknowledgement of our interdependence. These species emerge as “new speaking subjects,” reorganising how knowledge is produced and represented. They remind us that care must begin at the micro level. Their survival depends on the river’s rhythm, and our survival, in turn, depends on them.

Like a scientific mesocosm, Drumming for Love stages an experiment in cohabitation, producing knowledge through listening rather than measurement, through resonance rather than control. It is a sensorial map, one we can enter collectively through sound, where we experience what it means to inhabit a shared yet fractured hydrological future.

 

This work was commissioned within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4Water II residency programme by OGR with the support of Alpstream, Orti Generali, Fondazione Santagata, VisoaViso and the S+T+ARTS programme of the European Union.