From receding glaciers, via polluted rivers to fragile wetlands, rising water stresses across the world are impelling communities to foster more respectful and sustainable water cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects across Latin America, this talk proposes “hydrocommoning” as a conceptual horizon for creative practices that nurture connections and coalitions around bodies of water. A map of projects from the region shows how artists, curators, and communities are confronting legacies of harm with regenerative practices that combine aesthetic forms, territorial care, infrastructural interventions, connecting embodied experience to action.

Nos entrevistó la periodista Sara Medellín para esta nota publicada en el Día del Río Bogotá para activar conversaciones sobre la necesidad de la recuperación del río a través del saneamiento e infraestructura, y a su vez la tarea de reconstruir vínculos colectivos, memoria ambiental y nuevas formas de habitar el territorio alrededor del agua.

Nota completa vía este enlace

Which practices probe critically rivers’ datafication by digital tools and question the enclosure of its processes and outputs?

Looking forward to this fantastic event, convened by Amanda Smith (UC Santa Cruz) and Javier Uriarte (Stony Brook) in early April. The event is part of an in-progress edited book that Amanda and Javier have been developing since back in 2025 – these projects take time and dedication!

I’ll be presenting new work which is currently unfolding. I’m interested in thinking through convergences and negotiations between data and rivers in contemporary digital art and collective action.

The project is proving an opportunity to be (stay!) in conversation with dear and brilliant colleagues and friends, Federico Pérez Villoro and David Medina. I also have my eye on secura humana and some emerging work they are doing with AI.

Hydrocommoning Through Pumping: Performative Hydraulics in São Paulo’s Urban Rivers

In this paper, I develop the concept of “hydrocommoning” to examine how artistic and activist practices reconfigure human–water relations in São Paulo. I situate these practices within the city’s hydraulic history: from Indigenous habitation along the Tamanduateí to twentieth-century channelization, river reversal, and stream burial that transformed the Tietê and Pinheiros into energy and real estate infrastructures. Through archival documents and secondary literature, I trace how these projects intensified flooding and estranged residents from urban waters, consolidating a hydrosocial order that instrumentalizes and conceals river systems. To make a case for how hydrocommoning at the nexus of art and collective action is contesting the instrumentalization and enclosure of common waters, I focus on the guerrilla collective (se)cura humana and theorize their work as “performative hydraulics”: embodied acts of pumping, diverting, filtering, and daylighting water that materially and symbolically reintroduce rivers into public space. I analyze how specific performances, installations, and participatory projects model water remediation, stage gatherings to reclaim access to enclosed streams, and create durable infrastructures for commoning water. I argue that these practices exceed mere performance, but assemble contest hydraulic governance, foster hydropolitical negotiation, and prototype alternative hydrosocial futures grounded in common access to urban waters.

Momentum: Arte y ecología en la América Latina contemporánea, es un proyecto del Instituto Cisneros del Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York. Una versión ampliada de este libro se publicó en inglés por MoMA en 2024. Es español, la edición es de Caja Negra. Este libro invita a pensar América Latina como un laboratorio crítico donde el arte ensaya nuevas sensibilidades y horizontes frente a la crisis ecológica contemporánea.

La presentación abrirá un espacio de reflexión y diálogo en torno a las relaciones entre arte, política y crisis ambiental. El evento contará con dos conferencias a cargo de las autoras Graciela  Speranza y Lisa Blackmore, quienes abordarán algunos de los ejes centrales del libro, desde las derivas del extractivismo hasta las formas en que el arte reconfigura nuestra percepción de la naturaleza y el territorio. La jornada culminará con una conversación entre lxs curadorxs Carla Barbero y Javier Villa y el artista Adrián Villar Rojas, centrada en su trabajo y en problemáticas como el Antropoceno, el cambio climático y la imaginación de futuros posibles.

Más información vía Centro Cultural Recoleta

Happy that this text which combines an analysis of Salto del Tequendama (2021), by Emilio Chapela, with some cultural history of the Bogotá River, is now out. Tequendama Falls is a breathtaking body of water, a cascade of more than 150 meters that tumbles over a precipice.

Emilio and I have been in collaboration since 2019, bonded by our common interests in the lives of rivers, their communities, infrastructures, and material-aesthetic forms.

As well as connecting us with the contemporary crisis of the Tequendama Falls, on the polluted Bogotá River, Chapela’s work connects with a rich visual archive that charts the transformation of this river, from the Mhuysca’s occupation of the watershed to modernization and industrialization processes.

Salto del Tequendama was developed as part of Emilio’s aesthetic and theoretical exploration of the lives of rivers as they interact with the dynamics of human development. It was part of the co-curated program we ran together with Diego Chocano, now curator at the Barbican in London, when entre-ríos’ projects were forced online during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During that period, with a group of artists, scientists, scholars, and activists, we asked how remote channels -digital, embodied, aesthetic- would enable us to connect to bodies of water even from a distance. That collective inquiry resulted in the curatorial Channels we created for entre-rios.net

Durante 2024, desde entre—ríos convocamos a cuidadores y cuidadoras del río Bogotá a compartir cuatro convites de río. Nos juntamos en diferentes lugares de la cuenca alta y media: en la vereda Tenería en Suesca, en el Humedal Tibabuyes en Bogotá, en El Charquito en Soacha, y en el Espacio Odeón en Bogotá, para seguir evocando y tejiendo las redes que componen al río en la cotidianidad de su cuidado y defensa.

En cada punto, y en colaboración con diversos colectivos, iniciativas y acciones de cuidado y gobernanza, creamos un menú de río con alimentos que crecen en las huertas locales, que se sostienen gracias a recetas tradicionales que se han transmitido por generaciones. Nos encontramos para abrir el apetito, pero sobre todo para abrir el diálogo, buscando generar respuestas colaborativas sobre el cuidado del río a partir de una agenda de preguntas planteadas por los colectivos desde sus lugares específicos en la cuenca y las coyunturas más amplias que implica la interconexión en territorio hidrosocial.