Our Violent Hydrocommons

Water extractivism, in all its varied forms, continues this occupation of territories by a world that gives itself the right to assimilate local realities in the name of the “common good” of progress. Water privatization, pipelines, and large-scale infrastructures that bury and contaminate bodies of water are the ongoing legacy of the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, which actively produces space for the expansion of a one-world world, by making absent other worlds. Contemporary struggles to defend water across Turtle Island/Abya Yala — from Mapuche territories of Wallmapu (Chile) through Wet’suwet’en territory (Canada) — are also struggles for worlds, or what hydrofeminist scholar Astrida Neimanis calls the “hydrocommons.”Astrida Neimanis, “Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (Spring 2009): 161 – 82, accessible online. Colombian artists participate in these struggles by inviting reworldings — the recovery of alternate ways of relating to water, fish, food, and others across difference, in the wake of intersecting forms of violence that forcefully disappear worlds. La laguna del soldado/Soldier’s Lagoon (forthcoming 2024), an experimental nonfiction film by Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal-based filmmaker Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and Cuerpo permeable IX: Laguna/Permeable Body IX: Lagoon (2021), a performance video by Bogotá-based multidisciplinary artist Eulalia De Valdenebro, engage the hydrology of the Andean páramos — high-altitude grassland ecosystems that are the headwaters of many of Colombia’s rivers, providing a major water source for domestic, agricultural, and industrial consumption. Tracing waterways from their headwaters through rivers and urban channels, these works engage a double process that Escobar calls “ontological politics.” Calling our attention to the ontology of the neoliberal globalizing project of world markets that actively produces the disappearance of worlds, they performatively enact the endurances of ancestral water-worlds across the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in the ancient lands of the Muisca people, whose territory was traced by the system of paths that water took across the sky, the earth’s surface, the infraworld, and within human and nonhuman beings, from the páramo to the Bogotá savanna. The political ontologies of water that emerge from these works are part of a reparative justice process that recognizes watery territories as victims of the decades-long armed conflict. Over the last decade, artist Eulalia De Valdenebro has elucidated the relational ontologies of the páramo. Cuerpos permeables/Permeable Bodies (2011 –21) includes a series of performative actions that regenerate an intimate connection with the páramo by exploring continuities between her body and the hydraulic ecosystem that absorbs rainwater into its rich Andean tropical soils. In her series of experimental gestures, De Valdenebro decentres her own agency and authority, emphasizing her permeable relations with the rocks, the winds, and the lagoon. Intervening in the visual tropes of landscape cartography and botanical illustration introduced through colonial expeditions, her work disrupts aesthetic traditions that represent territories in order to occupy and profit from them. Instead, in Cuerpos permeables, she traces the permeability of human and nonhuman worlds as her body is traversed by the elemental beings that she encounters in the hydraulic ecosystem where frailejones — a plant species endemic to the region — channel water from the sky into the veins of the earth. Here, everything is revealed as a web of living forces. Her performative actions are not representations of territory, curator Lisa Blackmore argues, but immersions within it — a practice of “hydrocommoning.” Eulalia De ValdenebroStudy for frailejónmétrie comparative sc 1:1, 2020. Photo: courtesy of the artist Blackmore’s online curatorial platform entre — ríos/between — rivers gathers a confluence of projects, including Cuerpos permeables, that foster sustainability through collaborations with bodies of water in Colombia. Treating rivers as aesthetic and political agents that transform landscapes and shape historical memory, Blackmore adapts Neimanis’s concept of the hydrocommons as a curatorial frame. Mobilizing water’s materiality, Neimanis describes a shift from individualistic ways of conceiving identity toward a more relational approach; a “wet ontology” grounded in the fluids that are shared — however asymmetrically — between our watery bodies. We share a common history in our watery beginnings, she argues, even though “we are not all equally adrift.”Astrida Neimanis, “We Are All at Sea: Practice, Ethics, and Poetics of ‘Hydrocommons,’” RIBOCA2 — 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020, Mousse, November 17, 2020, accessible online. To negotiate these relations, she proposes a practice, an ethics, and a poetics of a radically embodied hydrocommons. Thinking about leaky bodies of water “in common” offers Neimanis an ecopolitical alternative to dominant globalized economies and cultures of water. Honouring water as the hydrocommons — “that which traverses and enables all life” — De Valdenebro returns to the river’s headwaters to elucidate a wet ontology of the páramo-world.Lisa Blackmore, Cuerpos Permeables: Páramos, Arte y Ciencia en Diálogo con las Obras de Eulalia De Valdenebro (Bogotá: Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt and entre — ríos, 2021), 5. Video still from the project Live Streams, curated by Lisa Blackmore, Emilio Chapela & Diego Chocano, Art Exchange, Colchester & entre-rios.net, 2021. Photo: courtesy of Lisa Blackmore The hydrocommons, however, is not without its turbulent undercurrents. Its aim of recognizing fluid continuities across watery bodies sits close to the homogenizing project of the one-world world that produces itself by erasing alternative ontologies or worlds. This is the darker side of the commons, which becomes common only by expelling experiences that do not conform to a dominant Eurocentric worldview. Colombian artists have examined the violence of the hydrocommons in film and media works that examine the relations among rivers, political violence, and historical memory. In his 2005 video Rio/River, conceptual artist Alberto Baraya interrupts the opaque surface of the Putumayo River with a burst of gunfire that evokes the waterway’s role in narcotrafficking, state abandonment, and territorial struggles between paramilitary and guerrilla groups. In her large-scale video installation Treno (canto fúnebre/funeral song) (2007), Clemencia Echeverri examines how rivers have been implicated in forced disappearances. For decades, they have been made into mass graves in a necropolitical campaign to promulgate terror and render mourning impossible. Dredging the Cauca River for the traces of the disappeared, she stages a dialogue between its two banks on monumental screens, submerging the spectator in a funeral dirge for a political catastrophe. In La laguna del soldado, Pablo Alvarez- Mesa traces these currents of political violence back to the place where rivers are born. The film is the second part of a trilogy about the legacies of Simón Bolívar’s 1819 liberation campaign. It retraces the path of Bolívar’s troops from the plains to the Páramo de Pisba in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, where the revolutionary forces encountered freezing rains and dense fog as they tried to reach Santafé de Bogotá, in a daring military feat that sealed the independence of Colombia from the Spanish Crown. La laguna del soldado registers floating rivers of mist as they condense into waters, irrigating the soils and accumulating in lagoons long considered sacred by the Muisca people, before spilling down into the Arzobispo and Cravo Sur rivers that provide water to the Orinoco River basin. Pablo Alvarez-MesaLa laguna del soldado, video still, 2024. Photo: courtesy of the artist “They were dumped here,” the voice tells us. “There is a lot of pain in these mountains.” The film is a study of place: anchored high in the Andean marshlands, a monument marks a mass grave in the clouds where the revolutionary army disposed of hundreds of troops who succumbed to cold and hunger during the crossing. The monument tries to hold the dead to their place. But water is slippery, intrinsically unpredictable, irreverent of boundaries. Whereas Neimanis’s wet ontology connects us materially in an aqueous hydrocommons, Alvarez-Mesa’s wet hauntology draws on water’s spectral materiality to attend to the dead that haunt waterways of Colombia — a country where, to this day, rivers are the cemeteries for countless victims. What happens to our watery bodies when rivers are made to circulate violence? Alvarez-Mesa’s portrait of this hydraulic territory unsettles the hydrocommons — showing us its underflow. The film goes searching for spectral traces in water, invoking multiple temporalities of violence. It conjures Bolívar’s ghost to hold him accountable for the patrimony of violence he unleashed in his liberation campaign, linking it to the present state of ecological and political violence. It observes the ways that violence, when left untended, is encrypted within our watery bodies and diffused across generations and geographies. Eulalia De ValdenebroCuerpo permeable VIII (niebla), Cuerpo permeble V (liquen) & Cuerpo permeable II (roca), installation view, Museo de artes visuales, Bogotá, 2021. Photo: courtesy of the artist Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe describes the ocean as an archive that is still animated by slavery and the antiblackness that persists in its wake, but Alvarez-Mesa finds the waterways of Colombia teeming with the dead that leak out of this mass grave: the decomposing bodies of these dead soldiers become the nutrients that cycle through the lagoons into rivers.Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). We are drinking them. Alvarez-Mesa develops his analogue film in them. In this way, the violent acts at the foundation of the nation get incorporated into bodies and into the body politic. This, too, is a form of the hydrocommons: “When violence is the form under which people share their world,” writes Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in Potential History, “violence is the form the commons take.”Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso, 2019), 143. Neimanis is right that the commons “does not stop at our skin.”Neimanis, “Bodies of Water,” 178. La laguna del soldado’s spectral ontology shows this to be truer still. In territories still marked by coloniality, the hydrocommons gestates violence. La laguna del soldado evokes the strange temporality of the páramo. It interweaves discrete yet overlapping layers of history, spanning the 1538 arrival of Spanish conquistadors in Muisca territories in search of the mythical El Dorado and the 1819 independence from Spain, when Criollo elites that assumed power proclaimed the universal rights of man while reinstating the same caste distinctions of the colonial model in which whiteness sits at the apex of power, status, and wealth. As rivers are buried below the city, the water beings disappear. These discrete temporalities of violence converge and condense. In revisiting these violent conjunctures, the film quietly but unequivocally goes about unlearning our violent hydrocommons. It traces an intimate but deeply political psycho-geographic territory of resistance for what Sharpe calls “wake work” — a mode of inhabiting and reimagining life in the wake of violence. Pablo Alvarez-MesaLa laguna del soldado, video still, 2024. Photo: courtesy of the artist Alvarez-Mesa’s film “uncommons” water. It opens a critical space for negotiating strategic alliances between heterogenous actors in a world where many worlds fit: environmentalists, ex-combatants, campesinos, Muisca descendants, and the dead, who are being recycled through water infrastructures. A group of ecologists marking birds and archiving the infrasounds of bats work with communities to form strategic alliances to defend water. Peasant coal miners describe their small-scale, heirloom operations as a form of resistance against regulated, corporate extraction. An ex-soldier seeks reconciliation with himself and with the earth by replanting the frailejones that were once harvested by troops for their warm, furry leaves. What the film makes present is “not a plurality of views of a single world, but a single view of different worlds.”See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (June 1, 2004): 6. Collectively these divergent actors cultivate intimate relationships with the páramo by studying and caring for it, exemplifying what Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena calls “uncommoning” — a mode of producing the commons in divergence.Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature,” e-flux 65, May 2015, accessible online. Reflecting on the hidden, which is given as much reality as the visible, Alvarez-Mesa deploys sound and then image to submerge us into the lagoon. Underwater, he invents another outcome for the sunken. Combining structuralist/materialist techniques with a sensitivity to landscape, a sequence of colour permutations opens a visual and sonorous bifurcation of time that feeds back through my watery body, reminding me that I too am gestating these cycles of violence fed by the Global North’s insatiable demand for “resources” — in this case visual, intellectual, spiritual. For a film that deals with violence, La laguna del soldado is poetic, slow, and observational. Its fluid dissolves and flares move with the mists to build surfaces and strategic opacities that obstruct my vision. The water enacts its own magical resistance: not even images, it says, can be extracted from these sacred lands where the Muisca buried their dead, “Because here is the origin of everything — the origin of water.” Its audiovisual poetics of liquidity plumbs the undertows of violence, but it is ultimately turned to the future, to the demand of entangled water-worlds for a temporal, ecological, and racial justice to come that necessarily exceeds the present. Eulalia De ValdenebroCuerpo permeable IX: Laguna, video still, 2021. Photo: courtesy of the artist In a parallel gesture, De Valdenebro’s Cuerpo permeable IX: Laguna performs an action to atone for our violent hydrocommons. A video documents the meticulous deconstruction of her grandfather’s gold cufflinks bearing the Colombian coat of arms — a symbol of patria, fatherland and nation. The cufflinks belonged to General Carlos Albán, a prominent leader in the Conservative Party, who died in combat during one of Colombia’s many civil wars. Removing the cufflinks from their blue-velvet case, De Valdenebro carefully pries them open. She smelts the twin patriotic shields in a searing blue flame until they are reduced to a small gold ball, which she returns to the waters of a lagoon in Páramo de Guasca in a gesture of de-patriation. Reversing the logic of extractivism, her performative action returns plundered gold in an act of intergenerational responsibility for colonial violence that seeks to regenerate a relation with waters. Eulalia De ValdenebroColor testing for frailejónmetric comparative & study for frailejónmetric comparative sc 1:1, 2020. Photo: courtesy of the artist Alvarez-Mesa and De Valdenebro deploy the twin strategies of political ontology: their wet hauntologies unsettle the hydrocommons, elucidating the cycles of violence that have produced the Muisca world as nonexistent in the effort to make a republic a commons (res publica). They reflect on the colonial forces that flow through Colombia’s image of itself as a nation, from the independence led by elite Criollos, through the turbulent period of the civil wars that General Albán commanded, to the present conflict that drinks from the very waters it uses as its grave. At the same time, they recover the relational worlds of the páramo. Engaging the present absence of the dead, they give us an opportunity to feel other worlds submerged in the open waterways of Colombia. These small political acts of uncommoning begin to regenerate a relationship with water, with the lagoons and the fog that they invite into the camera, and the pains they hold, through a durational process of walking, observing, and listening. An image theorist and independent curator, Gwynne Fulton holds a PhD in philosophy and art history from Concordia University. She is a contributor at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in Esse arts + opinions, Mosaic, In/Visible Culture, Dazibao editions, and ARP Books. Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa Eulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-MesaEulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-MesaEulalia De Valdenebro, Gwynne Fulton, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa

Our Violent Hydrocommons

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