This conference series, organized by the Cisneros Institute, looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, and local communities.
La memoria del agua (The Memory of Water), which was live-streamed on September 9, 2020, consists of an exchange between anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. Vicuña’s concept of veroir and de la Cadena’s conceptualization of antropociego (the anthropo-not-seen) undermine the cultural beliefs that are only spoken by humans. Both participants have specialized in similar concepts that perform the intra-relations between humans, land, language, and water—what de la Cadena terms “disobedient grammar” and what Vicuña calls palabrarmas. These oral technologies allow the formation of alliances between environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, and artists questioning modernity’s insistence on the divide between nature and culture.
This is the third and final part of Cumbre Aconcagua (The Aconcagua Summit), a series of conversations, or confabulaciones (confabulations), that take the subject of water as its guiding thread. Conceived by guest curator Camila Marambio, the conference looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, lawyers, ecofeminists, scientists, and local communities. It features artists whose work has such aquatic themes at its core to consider ways of conceiving of nature as an entity to be respected, rather than a resource to be exploited.
Cumbre Aconcagua is the first of a series of conferences that the Cisneros Institute is dedicating to the study of the relationship between the arts and the environment in Latin America. You can learn more about the Cisneros Institute programs here.
