FUGA presents, Crossing the line, is a project that investigates the different trajectories and ways of crossing the equator. The research begins with a family story, when during a boat trip between Buenos Aires and France, my grandfather was invited to personify Neptune in an initiation ritual when crossing the equator. The performance of the ritual, in this case in a festive setting linked to tourism, concealed a centuries-old tradition of a tortuous maritime ritual with strong colonialist and patriarchal content. The ritual implied that, transformed into men, the crew members could face the events that occurred on the voyage south. The crossing of the equator towards the South meant the entry into savage territory, so how can we think of an opposite trajectory? How does the equatorial crossing from the South to the North take place? Using different devices, such as video, photography, archives, testimonies, objects and textiles, the project reconstructs both the stages of the ritual and the work of repairing the networks that the xarxaires and illegal immigrants carry out in the port of Vilanova i La Geltrú, Catalonia. In the port, the women who carry out this unique trade that was historically permitted to them live side by side with illegal immigrants who, being fishermen in their places of origin, cannot return to the sea because of their status under the law. 

Since the beginning of the 16th century, in tune with the expansion of colonialism after the conquest of America, European sailors travelling to an unknown territory promised the sea or their gods to make a sacrifice, a sort of offering in exchange for a safe voyage. Those crew members who had not previously crossed the equator - which will soon separate the global South from the global North - were initiated into a ritual where they entrusted their lives to King (or Father) Neptune. During the tortuous ceremony, the uninitiated were subjected to a radical transformation under the subordination and domination of those who had already crossed the equator. During the ritual of passage, reserved only for men, the neophytes were dressed as women and subjected to beatings and various types of humiliation, with the purpose of abandoning their feminine features, which were considered weak. At certain times during the ritual, the uninitiated adopted animal features, controlled by crewmen whose faces were painted black, a distinctive symbol to represent blacks, a practice that ceased after the incorporation of blacks into the navy.

As for the ritual, the investigations carried out so far detail that it began when Neptune took the ship, preceded by a flag with skulls and bones and accompanied by his court: the eldest of the crew, who had previously passed the line, approached the other sailors with a blackened face, a hat and a sea book in his hand. The freshmen <or uninitiated>, awaited him with cooking utensils in their hands, iron grates, kettles or bells to announce with sounds the arrival of the King. Neptune sat at the foot of the main mast, in the magistrate's court, where each of the initiates swore on the book and a map that he would repeat the same ceremony when circumstances demanded it. After a series of trials, assaults, and humiliations they were baptised with icy sea water and dark marks on their foreheads of fat and dead fish and thrown down a tunnel with rubbish simulating a birth canal.

Opening - 25/06/2025 - Barcelona