Reclaiming Futures:
Water Sovereignties
Today, struggles over rights to water center on who owns water resources and determines how they get used and in what ways water futures are being envisioned and planned. Large-scale water infrastructures, privatization, and financialization have been remaking frameworks through which water has been approached and understood—namely water as more than a resource, as a commons, and as a right. At stake in these struggles is access to a material necessary for life and one that is potentially becoming increasingly inaccessible to many, a condition made all the more urgent by water’s dwindling under climate change. Water management, moreover, plays a crucial role in competing national and territorial claims over finite shared resources, shaping state development projects and narratives, and remaking geographies. New projects and policies have not been without contestation; resistance has been mounted by local activists and Indigenous nations working to reclaim sovereignty, ownership, and control over the fate of water bodies. Scholars and artists are also documenting and partaking in action responding to the social and ecological consequences of ongoing transformations. From the geopolitical ambitions driving hydropower development to the privatization and financialization of water resources to struggles to reclaim water as a right rather than as a source of profit, the creative projects featured in this online exhibition dispatch and accompanying essay contributions shed light on the different forms ‘water sovereignties’ take today and what they might tell us of water’s potential futures.
Water Sovereignties is the first of three installments of the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures, which showcases seven works by creative practitioners from around the world commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project; these practitioners critically examine how design, architecture, and technology are imbricated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities but also present tools with which to imagine and build more equitable, democratic, and sustainable worlds. Commissioned practitioners include Solveig Qu Suess, Antonia Hernández, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from the collective Arazi Assembly. Following an invitation to submit project proposals, the chosen works were developed over the last year and a half and in conversation with the curators and other commissioned practitioners.
Based on extensive research, the works run along thematic threads that interrogate resource management regimes and how neoliberal operations violently remake ecosystems and lifeworlds; planetary urbanization and urban lived realities; and contemporary state-led development and settlement policies, and activism and activist solidarities in response. Through a wide range of approaches—from design research and science fiction to forensic architecture and political organizing—these works not only witness and document such phenomena but also raise critical questions about urbanisms, developmentalisms, and environmentalisms from below. They foreground situated ecological knowledge and relations; contest official regimes for apprehending and managing nature; and reimagine value, the commons, and forms of social organization. The resulting projects are forward-looking in their engagement with futures, while centering the necessity of reckoning with inherited and ongoing injustices; they are socially committed while embracing the multiplicity of more-than-human ecologies and planetary futures.
Each exhibition installment, which focuses on a distinct theme, features a selection of projects from among the commissions; these are accompanied by essays from guest contributors, whose writing the creative practitioners felt resonated with their work. The essays shed further light on the topics, geographies, and questions broached in the projects presented.
Water Sovereignties features commissions by Solveig Qu Suess and Antonia Hernández. Suess’s video project Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains hones in on efforts to measure and manipulate the Mekong River in Southeast Asia ranging from cold war hydroelectric modernization dams to contemporary sustainable hydro-energy plans in order to illuminate how the river and region have and continue to be shaped by geopolitics. The project considers the measurement work involved in such development initiatives and the counter-measurements being conducted by local environmentalists as the basis for contesting state-led projects and their impacts on the river’s health. It highlights the experiential realities of riverine communities that depart from official narratives, and imagines the future of the river and its management otherwise. Antonia Hernández’s video opera Dry Water gives a multilayered account of the subjects, characters, and spaces involved in water’s management in the Petorca valley in Chile, where a multi-year drought is being exacerbated by the intensification of water-intensive avocado farming. The project considers two different water management models prevalent in the valley—collectively-run local drinking water associations and investor-owned private companies— and reflects on how legal, demographic, and infrastructure changes are making investment in water more profitable and threatening the future of water’s collective ownership and management, though not without pushback from residents and activists. Both Suess’s and Hernández’s projects highlight the ways in which disparate sometimes distant forces shape locales and how these locales are as such entry points for understanding planetary conditions and shared struggles over reclaiming water sovereignties.
The accompanying texts by Andrew Alan Johnson, Jerome Whitington, Michael Pryke, and Meera Karunananthan and Marcela Olivera expand the conversations and questions that Suess’s and Hernández’s creative projects open up. Building on their own long-standing research and praxis, the essay contributors delve into the tensions the creative projects raise between water as a resource or right, and water as an asset for humans or as a lifeline central to transhuman material, cultural, and spiritual flourishing. They also touch on the possibilities inherent in approaching water more inclusively and expansively. Jerome Whitington’s essay complicates the question of sovereignty by tackling the sovereignty claims over nature embedded in the predominant engineering paradigm. Treating uncertainty or what is outside of human control as a positive condition of living, Whitington encourages us to find plentitude and flourishing on this earth that is “alive with trembling potential.” Likewise, Andrew Alan Johnson looks at what falls outside of calculation in the reduction of nature to a resource rather than a sovereign being in its own right. By engaging multiple narratives and embodied experiences around water bodies along the Mekong River, Johnson presents a view of water as an agent of connection rather than an object of one-sided relations. Michael Pryke considers how financialization is transforming household water bills and local water infrastructures into sources of revenue for global investors and reshaping geographies of value in the process. He considers water’s financialization in the UK, US, and Chile to tease out both global trends within water and distinctive features in each locale. Meera Karunananthan and Marcela Olivera consider how the violent histories of market-based environmentalism in Latin America and contemporary financial actors are transforming hydrosocial relations by bringing them under the control of financial markets. They simultaneously document efforts by frontline communities to develop via networks of solidarity ways of dealing with water that are on their own terms and that do not relinquish their rights or decision-making power.