How to Eat a Polluted River? Curatorial Practice, Metabolic Literacies and Cultures of Care

In this chapter, I reflect on curatorial practice as a mode of stimulating critical reflection on hydrosocial well-being and explore the role of 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 sixteen river defenders and caretakers at Tequendama Falls to share a menu of food grown in the river basin. The gathering is part of RÍO BOGOTÁ, an ongoing curatorial collaboration we are developing through 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.