Antonia Hernández’s video opera Dry Water gives a multilayered account of the subjects, characters, and spaces involved in the management of drinking water in the Petorca valley in Chile, which has been profoundly impacted by a decade-long drought. At once threatened by desertification and dominated by water-intensive industries, Petorca has become a local symbol in the struggle for water justice and exemplifies the effects of neoliberal water governance under increasingly critical environmental conditions.
The work zooms in on drinking water infrastructures in the Petorca valley, revealing the coexistence of two distinct systems. In rural areas, drinking water is managed by collectively-run local drinking water associations (APRs) with assistance from local governments. In urban centers, water infrastructure is private and entirely owned by a Canadian pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). Although precarious, the equilibrium between these two models of valuing, managing, and understanding water is being threatened by a new legal framework that imposes unachievable conditions on APRs and paves the way for rural water’s privatization.
Dry Water is conceived as an opera in which drama unfolds through an array of temporalities, lifeworlds, and value appraisals. In this mottled landscape, monetary flows mingle with Andean natural springs, and finance capitalism makes ripples in dry rivers. More than a denunciation, Dry Water presents a choral storytelling in which desertification is conjured through religious processions; wealth coexists with dispossession; and resistance grows, colorfully, in recycled plastic bottles.
DRY WATER
NOTES FOR A VIDEO OPERA
libretto (excerpts)
soundtrack samples / projections
director’s book (excerpts)
Antonia Hernández is an artist, researcher, and educator. Combining theory with art-based practices, she creates research devices to explore the poetics of governance and elemental relations. She has presented her work and creation methodologies extensively in conferences, exhibitions and artist talks, and is preparing a book on maintenance activities for sexual webcam platforms. Her current project, Hydrofictions, investigates imaginaries around water, including financial and speculative ones. https://www.antoniahernandez.com/