And while rivers are one of the most fluctuating forces in nature, whose features move so obviously, the natural world as a whole is in constant motion. Tectonic plates drift across a spinning planet. Mountains are lifted up and eroded to the sea. Glaciers advance and retreat. As Richard White writes in his book The Organic Machine, “Our metaphors for rivers are all metaphors of movement; they run and roll and flow. And like us, rivers work. They absorb and emit energy; they rearrange the world.” How, then, can something that is constantly in flux be understood as having been radically changed?
I was struck by how global processes and far-flung stakeholders act on the Mekong, situated as they are far away from the actual sites of the dams themselves, and how visual regimes— not only documentary films, but also surveys,
photographic documentation, and promotional material— have long been complicit in the reorganization of the world enacted by large-scale infrastructure projects. Dams are not limited to material infrastructures but are as temporally and spatially distributed as the processes that sustain them. The dam exists as a specter; its presence is often felt at a distance, partly because access to the dam is heavily securitized and hard to reach. But as cultural anthropologist Andrew Alan Johnson writes, the Mekong becoming dammed opens up a new uncertain field of potency, where different futures are enabled and the everyday transformed.
