Corrientes subterráneas

One morning, a large puddle on the kitchen floor, stealthy and unexpected, marks the beginning of a daily life of buckets and basins: something irrepressible has suddenly overflowed beyond repair at Kirsty Bell's house. Without a doubt, a reflection of the bankruptcy, of the broken home. Now, that flowing water also tells of the tumultuous history of the building in which your apartment is located, a stately 19th-century building on the banks of Berlin's Landwehr canal, set to the west but facing east, on a ground indelibly inscribed in the trauma, at the center of great historical metamorphoses and small domestic changes. The urgent leaks and seeps that haunt her family life drain, metaphorically, into the canal in front of her house and into the swamp on which the German capital was built. When her marriage falls apart, Bell becomes obsessed with the history of her home and of Berlin, his adopted city and the hometown of her children. Taking the panorama from his window as a starting point, he resorts, as if it were a lifeline, to the lives of the various inhabitants of the building, to texts by Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Rosa Luxemburg or Gabriele Tergit, and to the protagonists of the works of Theodor Fontane, Maxie Wander and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to try to stay afloat. From this inquiry emerges a dazzling work of memorial and cultural criticism, as well as a new topography, which takes advantage of underground, literary and literal currents, to recover untold or forgotten stories -especially those of women- under the usual narrative layers of the great metropolis and rebuild, along with the past of others, also his own life. Human, thought-provoking, and moving, Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that advocates radical readings of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.