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.