Happy to see this new edited collection about arts practice, climate crisis and technologies of cooperation is available for pre-order with the University of Chicago Press and direct from the publisher, diaphanes.
My contribution unpacks the curatorial collaboration with Laura Giraldo-Martínez, Diego Piñeros-García and Juliana Steiner in which we have been convening culinary gatherings with river stewards and institutional actors in the Bogotá River watershed since 2023. The chapter considers food and communal eating as aesthetic mediums to cultivate metabolic literacy around hydrosocial interdependence. I narrate the story of our fieldwork visiting and listening to Indigenous councils, nature tourism initiatives, environmental education projects and heritage institutions along the course of the Bogotá River, from its pristine source to the Tequendama Falls, where its critical contamination has led it to be declared biologically dead. By sharing experiences we witnessed of daily care for the watershed’s ecosystems, its organic vegetable plots, seed banks and community spaces, “How to eat a river” maps a different reality of one of the world’s most polluted rivers, demonstrating how small-scale actions make a tangible difference and enable the imagination of alternative futures.
Edited by Liliana Gómez and Fabienne Liptay, eco-operations reflects on the climate change crisis as part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. eco-operations addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding interruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of “flow” and “network” as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, eco-operations instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they themselves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, in which they simultaneously intervene when searching for alternative ways of creating collaborative practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, eco-operations explores this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and political challenges. eco-operations features contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, Mateo Chacón Pino, Lucrezia Cippitelli, T. J. Demos, Sandra Frimmel, Laura Flórez, Lorena Cely, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Uriel Orlow, and Dorota Sajewska.