Saying the water, saying the river. Notes with archive

Abstract

This paper looks at some landmarks of the aquatic imagination in Latin America, paying attention to a vibrant matter that promotes assemblages, possible files of temporary superimpositions, sound capsules, time machines, sensitive surfaces, contacts, murmured dialogues, voices and reverberations that encompass us but also exceed us in their transversality. Streams and rivers spin close ties with the coasts they touch, with living beings, with stones and even with those who travel at their expense. From that difficult familiarity arises the judgment of a romantic continuity between the territory of the river and the human presence in the world. Apparently, accidents and nature have always been used as a metaphor for an emotional state. However, there are many indications of the breakdown of that device that thought a continuity between the river and the human world, the mountain and the horizons of the living. At present, the imaginations of water display a non-anthropocentric consideration, imbued with a more radical commitment with the living and with the forces of Gaia, now focused on the continuity between bodies and environment. In its journey, the work spins the rivers of Juan Rulfo with those of Marcelo Brodsky; the mud that drags in the story of Rafael Muñoz with that of Libertad Demitrópulos. Many other rivers end up flowing into the work of Adriana Salazar Todo lo vivo, todo lo muerto: el Lago de Texcoco. As an aquatic territory, lagoons occupy a particular position in the imagination. They are suspicious deposits, more stable than the river, less abysmal than the sea, although they are not excluded for this reason as residences of prehistoric monsters or magical beings.