ABSTRACT
The violent transformation of landscapes with its related political and environmental conflicts is characterized by a historical oblivion that has been contested by art interventions that bring up and experiment with the motives and media of fluidities. This chapter brings together three recent art interventions by Clemencia Echeverri and María Magdalena Campos-Pons that reverberate the lived experience of environmental degradation and conflict as deshumanization, loss, and mourning. Both artists use liquids/liquidity to unfold ambivalences, contradictions, and the incommensurable of cultural work. By understanding ‘liquids’ as ontological and metaphorical materials, the chapter discusses the use of liquids and bodies of water in these artworks as a media-reflexive dimension of art, mirroring a long engagement in Latin American and Caribbean arts with fluidity and liquidity as cultural metaphors that ground new analytical terrains. The artists’ works, as acts of remaining, engage with the “imperial debris,” in the way they recreate liquids – such as rivers, water or alcohol – to materialize omitted or submerged gestures that embody the ephemeral materiality of memory work, and in so doing foreground situations of political or environmental conflict and social crisis.
