Lisa Blackmore, Turbulent River Times: Art and Hydropower in Latin America’s Extractive Zones, in Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, ed. by Lisa Blackmore & Liliana Gómez. New York: Routledge, 2020
In this chapter, I examine the temporal regimes subtending resource imaginations of water and artistic engagements with hydraulic infrastructures, engaging with industrial history, the infrastructural turn in cultural anthropology, and ecocriticism, making a contribution to hydrohumanities scholarship and methodologies.
Through this transdisciplinary framework, I explore the confluences of socio-political processes of industrialisation, the formation of resource imaginations, the environmental aesthetics of artworks, and the material lives of infrastructures and rivers.The first section delves deeper into the questions at stake in thinking about rivers’ temporalities, positing time not as an abstract concept but as a contact zone for diverse epistemologies and assemblages of human and non-human forces. Next, I discuss three artworks produced in dialogue with hydraulic infrastructures from the 1970s to the present. Beginning with the outsize kinetic artworks created for the Guri Dam in the Orinoco Basin, a major hydroelectric project that exemplifies the peak of mega-dam construction in 1970s South America, Finally, I discuss the practice of the contemporary Colombian artist, Carolina Caycedo, exploring her collaborations with anti-dam movements and victims of infrastructural failures, focusing on her River Serpent Book (2017) as a polychronic work that enfolds alternative temporalities and worldviews into the spatiotemporal order of modernity.
