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Reimagining watersheds as living hydrocommons through which artists and communities create more just and sustainable futures

Hydrocommoning explores how artists, activists, and curators coalesce around water in embodied efforts to contest entrenched and enduring forms of harm and degradation. Against the reduction of rivers, streams, and wetlands to mere resources to be managed, Hydrocommoning centers water as a living web of relations through which artists and communities forge creative means of reconnection by moving, weaving, pumping, eating, and listening.

By charting these aesthetic practices, Hydrocommoning shows how artists and organizers across Latin America oppose extractivism, unequal urbanization, ecological degradation, and the erasure of Indigenous water cultures. To cultivate widespread social attunement to vulnerable waters and raise the call for their defense and care, collectives in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru engage in communal meals, sound art, infrastructural interventions, and other practices that Lisa Blackmore theorizes as “hydrocommoning.”

Grounded in five years of experiential fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects in Latin America, Blackmore proposes a methodology to work with water as an analytical framework for collective action. Bridging the gap between theory, curating, and community-based practices, Hydrocommoning offers a promising vision of grassroots organizing that actively confronts some of today’s most urgent ecological threats.

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