I first encountered Carolina’s work at Incerteza Viva, the 32 Bienal de São Paulo in 2016. I incorporated the book into the Collecting Art from Latin America postgrad course taught at the University of Essex in 2018. Our student Miharu Hori successfully presented an acquisition proposal for the Serpent River Book and the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America acquired the book. In 2019, I curated the first solo show of Carolina’s work in the United Kingdom at Art Exchange, including a film interview I recorded with Carolina at the Conjuro de ríos exhibition presented in 2018 at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Carolina Caycedo: When walls become rivers, Art Exchange, Colchester
February 14 – March 21, 2020
Dams silence rivers. They control living flows, channelling water into structures and systems that harness it as a resource for hydropower and extractive industries.
But rivers are so much more than that. They overspill the walls built to contain them and constantly reshape landscapes. They dry up too, desiccating the earth as they retreat.
This exhibition brought together a body of works by the Colombian contemporary artist Carolina Caycedo that relate to the lives of rivers and the struggles waged by social movements and indigenous communities to protect water, and other forms of ecological commons, from commodification and privatisation.
At the heart of the show was Serpent River Book (2017), an unfolding publication that MA students from the module “Collecting Art from Latin America” successfully proposed for acquisition by ESCALA in 2018. As it flowed through the space, this “river” bore the sediments of rich cultures, diverse knowledges and sustainable economies that enrich and support human and non-human lives.
Honouring a different type of hydropower, one that recognises how rivers escape human control, through Caycedo’s work, the exhibition invited us to reconnect to water and to honour the female environmental activists who raise their voices against worldviews that deaden nature, and instead insist on its vitality.
Lisa Blackmore
Installation Views
Public Program
Carolina Caycedo (London, 1978)
Carolina Caycedo works across diverse media, creating photographs, artist’s books, hanging
sculptures, performances, films, and installations that invite reflection on socioecological dynamics. She works closely with communities across the Americas, with a specific focus in water justice causes in Latin America.
Since 2012, she has been developing BE DAMMED, a project that unfolds across different territories and media to explore human-water relations shaped by extractivist extractivism.