The dam is a form of border. A notion of environmental historical memory in the work of Carolina Caycedo

Abstract

This text analyzes a series of works about rivers and dams by artist Carolina Caycedo entitled Be Dammed. (2012-present). The main question this research addresses is how do the aesthetic strategies of these works identify the socio-ecological problems generated by dams and  ontribute to articulate political imaginaries of sustainability? The main argument is that Caycedo’s works on the Magdalena or  uma river contribute to the construction of an environmental historical memory based on popular knowledge, peasants and indigenous cosmovisions. To this end, this text characterizes the problem of the dams based on Macarena Gómez-Barris notion of extractivismo, Rob Nixon’s concept of deterritorialization, and then it embarks on a journey through the artist’s works, from whose analysis a characterization of the environmental historical memory of a segment of the Magdalena or Yuma River is constructed. The conceptual framework of the work includes the notions of  arthbeings
by Marisol de la Cadena and territory by Arturo Escobar, as well as the memory of the rivers by Kristina Lyons. The methodology is based on the conceptual and technical analysis of Caycedo’s art pieces within the interdisciplinary framework of Environmental Humanities. The analysis concludes that Caycedo’s works generate spaces of environmental historical memory from transnational perspectives and in these spaces of encounter that constitute the works, the extremes of false antagonisms as nature/culture, human /non-human and art/science and are related and rearticulated.