Art for the Hydrocommons

Bibliographic Data

ID3914235
AuthorsLisa Blackmore (0000-0002-0472-9419, University of Essex, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume17
Issue1
Pages23-44
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11543399
OpenAlexW4409014007
LanguageEN
References cited31

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 about 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. It approaches the form and context of artworks that mediate complex watery environments through 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

American Environmental and Regional History · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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