ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the generative potential of analysing reckonings with river time that occur at the interfaces of hydrology, hydraulics and art. Using a transdisciplinary framework, it examines resource imaginations of water, the material lives of rivers and offers ecocritical analyses of artistic engagements with hydraulic infrastructures and rivers. The first section situates “extractivist time” as a linear metric for industrial modernity materialised in flow control, landscape art and infrastructuralpoeisis. It counterposes rivers’ deep geohistory and “turbulences” (Michel Serres) to the myopia of anthropocentric river time, exploring rivers as contact zones for diverse epistemologies and assemblages of human and non-human forces. The discussion then turns to artworks produced in response to hydraulic infrastructures, first situating Carlos Cruz Diez and Alejandro Otero’s the outsize kinetic artworks at the Guri Dam in the Orinoco Basin as synchronous with mid-twentieth century developmentalism, then positing alternate interpretations that reveal the permeability to unpredictable non-human flows. The chapter closes by arguing that Carolina Caycedo’s Serpent River Book (2017) problematises dominant resource imaginations of water by showing how this polychronic work enfolds a turbulent liquid ecology where epistemologies, matter and bodies mingle amid climatic, infrastructural, economic, socio-political and cultural forces in constant flux.
