Water

Environmental Aesthetics proposes the analysis of physical landscapes and their mediation in cultural production as two intertwined threads that further our understanding of socioecological worlds. This chapter takes up that task in relation to liquid environments and water-related art. The first part explores territories, infrastructures, and systems of flow as “objects of appreciation” (Fisher 2005, 667) in their own right, whose aesthetic formations bespeak long histories of human relations to water and their related political ecological contexts. I refer to these as "hydrocultural formations," that is, material aesthetic forms produced by human and non-human forces. The second part of the chapter identifies aesthetic currents in artworks that invent channels to sense flows of more-than-human water cycles across multiple scales and registers, from the bodily to the infrastructural, the sacred to the contaminated. In material and metaphorical terms, water is much more than a chemical compound; its fluid forms interact with other matter in "liquid ecologies" that are "host to turbid histories of capital flows, philosophical currents, aesthetic traditions and residual traumas that connect distinct spaces, times and bodies" (Blackmore and Gómez 2020, 2). By identifying and analyzing key figures and dynamics in a select corpus, I chart how artists mediate the "interpermeations" (Neimanis 2016), "contact zones" (Pratt 1991) and modes of fast and "slow violence" (Nixon 2013) inherent in the Latin American hydrosphere, and explore how artworks imagine alternate water cultures and hydrocommunities engaged in speculative "ethics of care" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), and socioecological and cognitive reparation.