ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a critical and conceptual framework for understanding rivers as agents, rather than mere objects, of cultural production. Engaging with new materialist theory and ecological thinking, the essay examines poetic and artistic engagements with the river as a leitmotif and with specific rivers to ask: What aesthetic forms approximate ways of being river to render porous the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies of water? Can we identify a somatic aesthetics that opens up channels to sense how humans and rivers affect each other, fostering a posthuman notion of ecological wellbeing? To respond to these questions, I examine fluvial motifs in works by the Peruvian poet Javier Heraud, identifying “ambient poetics” that evoke rivers as producers—not objects—of landscapes. Then I explore sound works by the contemporary Colombian artist Leonel Vásquez, considering how he mobilizes embodiment and enchantment to encourage ethical dispositions to contaminated river flows. Ultimately, I contend that ambient poetics and sensory attunement articulate a liquid ecological aesthetics that dislocates anthropocentric paradigms by attending to the agency of rivers as active flows that move, sound, and sculpt other material bodies, and whose effects and affects cannot be fully predicted or harnessed by human reason or hydraulic infrastructure.
