Lisa Blackmore, How to eat a polluted river? Curatorial practice, metabolic literacies, and cultures of care. Eco-Operations, ed. by Liliana Gómez & Fabienne Liptay, 109-140. Zurich: diaphanes, 2025.
Eating comes first. Eating is movement. Eating is a prenatal impulse and an action that inaugurates and implicates the body. Eating is reaching and retaining temperature. Eating is ingesting solar energy scattered through the cosmos and transformed by plants into living bodies, into nourishment. Eating is tracing our evolutionary process and transmuting from single-cell organisms into animals, in a single bite. Eating is incorporating within us other forms of life. Eating is knowing a territory. Eating is entering into communion. Carlos Alfonso and Cristina Consuegra, Mundos Mutuos. Bogotá: Cajón de Sastre, 2020.
Food networks materialize in very tangible ways the metabolic principle of how life unfolds through mutual seepages, leakages, and imbrications, which are cycled across different scales of interrelation that connect our bodies’ intimate, internal landscapes to external, ecological dynamics. In concrete terms, noticing such dynamics can stimulate awareness of how ecosystem health and public health exist in a continuum and reflection on the eco-ethical implications for considering how human systems impact the wellbeing of rivers, lakes, and oceans. These implications are especially urgent in polluted and toxic environments, which need practices that can summon and galvanize political will and action toward decontamination and protection.
In this chapter, I reflect on curatorial practice as a mode of stimulating critical reflection on hydrosocial well-being and think with eating as an aesthetic medium to support metabolic literacies of riverhood. I weave these inquiries through the Piquete del Río Bogotá, a communal lunch curated in 2023 to gather 16 river defenders and caretakers at Tequendama Falls to share a menu of food grown in the river basin. The gathering is part of RIO BOGOTÁ, an ongoing curatorial collaboration with Laura Giraldo-Martínez, Diego Piñeros García and Juliana Steiner, that we are developing as the entre—ríos collective to address the protracted ecological crisis affecting the Bogotá River in Colombia, one of the most polluted watersheds in the world.
This research was supported by research impact grants awarded by the University of Essex. It was developed in collaboration with the Bogotá River and with Laura Giraldo-Martínez, Diego Piñeros García and Juliana Steiner, Carlos Alfonso and Cristina Consuegra, and through the participation and energy of the collectives, individuals and institutions involved in Colombia. ¡Por un río vivo!
Photographs: Gabriela Molano, 2023. Courtesy entre—ríos.











