Art for the Hydrocommons: Rethinking Human-Water Relations in Latin America

This article elucidates a select corpus of contemporary artworks from Latin America as art for the hydrocommons by showing how they make generative contributions to imagining more just human-water relations and to thinking critically the impacts of colonialism, urbanization, and extractivism on waterbodies. Offering an interdisciplinary methodology for the hydrohumanities, the article addresses environmental aesthetics by drawing on urban history, environmental justice, political ecology, and anthropology to probe specific landscapes, and by approaching the form and context of artworks that mediate complex watery environments ecocritical analysis. The discussion focuses on buried urban rivers, postdisaster waterscapes, and high Andean water cycles through recent artworks by Tania Candiani (Mexico), Mabe Bethônico (Brazil), and Ana Teresa Barboza and Rafael Freyre (Peru). It analyzes how sound, photography, and weaving serve as aesthetic mediums for critical, imaginative, and embodied engagements with water across expansive temporal and spatial scales. Ultimately the article argues that art for the hydrocommons makes its most compelling contribution to rethinking hydrosocial relations when it emerges as part of broader landscapes of sociolegal and hydropolitical transitions striving for more just water cultures across diverse fronts.